David Goldman writes for National Review Online about China’s threatening economic plans.

China has a plan to assimilate most of the world’s population into a virtual empire dominated by its telecommunications, computation, manufacturing, and logistics. You can read all about it on Huawei’s English-language website, and hear it streamed in the main presentations at Huawei’s Connect 2019 mega-conference in Shanghai. There are no secrets here. China is proud of what it has accomplished at home and what it proposes to accomplish globally.

5G broadband is the key — the key that unlocks hundreds of doors in the world of 21st-century technology.

U.S. officials warn that Huawei might steal Western data on behalf of China’s intelligence services. That really is beside the point. Spy agencies always exaggerate the importance of secrets; after all, they trade in secrets, and they are as eager to talk up the value of their merchandise as anyone else. Whether Huawei has the capacity to steal data or not is a secondary issue. It plans to persuade the world to give up its data for free, the way Tom Sawyer persuaded his friends to whitewash his fence.

Take the case of health care, which now composes 10 percent of the GDP of the world’s developed nations and may become the world’s single biggest industry as an aging population requires more medical services. Huawei will provide users with a sensor that plugs into a smartphone and slips over the index finger, taking your oxygen level, heart rate, temperature, and blood pressure. Another smartphone sensor will take an electrocardiogram. You will upload your vital signs and heart status to your smartphone, and from there to the Cloud, along with your digitized health records, family health history, and — before long — a genetic analysis of your DNA to detect a predisposition to stroke or heart attack. Huawei’s artificial-intelligence servers will slice and dice your data and cross-grid your information with hundreds of millions of case histories.