China’s HarmonyOS is growing too fast

If Hongmeng is confined to China, its potential for cooperation with the outside world is bound to decrease.

HAN WOO-DUKThe author is a senior reporter of the China Lab. In Chinese creation mythology, a divine figure named Pangu opened heaven and created earth. The time before Pangu is called Hongmeng, which is literally the vast mist of primordial chaos. Huawei’s smartphone operating system, HarmonyOS, is dubbed Hongmeng in Chinese.

Chinese e-commerce companies like JD.com, Meituan and Alibaba are looking for Hongmeng developers. As they offer a minimum of 100 million won ($76,517), Hongmeng is absorbing talents.

Hongmeng is mainly used on Huawei smartphones; other handsets still use Google’s Android or Apple’s iOS. But Hongmeng cannot be ignored, as the state is behind it — or rather, the Open Atom Foundation under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).

As Huawei has “dedicated” all of its Hongmeng sources to the foundation, that foundation now takes charge of everything — from modifications to the system for application in different industries to making each source public so that any company can use it.

As a result, Hongmeng’s private technology has become a state asset. Baidu’s blockchain platform, XuperChain, and Tencent’s low power-consumption IoT system, TencentOS-tiny, are released in a similar way. This is how China’s unique state capitalism works.

Huawei says that 700 million handsets are using HarmonyOS. The key axis is the Mate 60 Pro, which recently surprised the world.

Hongmeng’s territory is now expanding beyond smartphones. Electric cars like the Zhijie and the Aito, which Huawei produces with carmakers, also use Hongmeng’s OS. The navigation, air conditioning system and video feeds on these vehicles are perfectly synced to Huawei phones, which shows how fast Hongmeng has spread in China.

This is the result of competition for technological hegemony between the United States and China. The United States blacklisted Huawei in May of 2019 and has mounted pressure on the company since. America was determined to drive Huawei out of the Android ecosystem.

Then, Huawei accelerated the development of Hongmeng and released the first version in August of the same year. Currently, Hongmeng holds 16 percent of the Chinese market. The United States effectively helped Hongmeng to rise.

It remains to be seen whether Hongmeng will succeed. But it seems certain that U.S. sanctions are rather advancing the independence of China’ smart technology standards. Similar phenomena are seen in chips, electric vehicles and AI.

If Hongmeng is confined to China, its potential for cooperation with the outside world is bound to decrease. That’s why the rest of the world is wary of Hongmeng’s fast expansion.