A visitor plays a mobile game on a 5G network at a booth at InterContinental Shenzhen, South China’s Guangdong Province. (Photo/Courtesy of Huawei)
In spite of U.S. pressure and discrimination, Huawei Technologies will not stop reaching out to academics and funding basic research programs worldwide, as global collaboration is critical to accelerate technology development in the 5G era, industry representatives said.
Rising protectionism that hinders not only trade and movement of people but also research and ideas, is going to have a negative spillover impact on technology, as well as the potential of 5G, Andrew Williamson, vice president of market insights at Huawei Technologies, told the Global Times at an industry conference in Nanjing, East China's Jiangsu Province, over the weekend.
Universities in countries like the U.S. have been distancing themselves from Huawei in recent months, in response to Washington's call for barring the Chinese company's advanced 5G networks for security reasons.
British universities such as Oxford University have announced they no longer accept donations from Huawei from January, according to media reports. Leading U.S. universities such as Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have followed suit.
Rising obstacles have not hindered the Chinese tech giant's determination to work with academics around the world.
"We have high hopes, as Huawei always invests for the long term… and we hope eventually these obstacles and challenges that we face, which are essentially political in nature, will be overcome by everybody," Williamson said.
Huawei is committed to invest $300 million every year to fund academic research in basic science and technologies, and technological innovation, while it plans to keep inviting researchers and scholars to explore future technologies that benefit the humankind.
"I'm all for cooperation and finding out how we can work together to make things possible," P.A. Subrahmanyam, a professor at Stanford University, told the Global Times.
