China's Golden Shield

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Tsinghua’s engineering faculty has close ties with the Bell-Northern Research Lab (BNR) in Montreal, a Nortel research and development subsidiary, (36) and the laboratory where Nortel’s own speech recognition module (STM) was developed. During the Canadian trade mission to China in 1998, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien announced that Nortel Networks and Tsinghua would establish a joint research laboratory. (37) A primary goal of the research laboratory was to accelerate the development of networking expertise in China. The agreement also included an "expert exchange program" between Nortel Networks and Tsinghua University to facilitate closer collaboration. Indeed, graduates of Tsinghua’s engineering department went on to play key roles in developing Nortel’s speech recognition module.

Similarly, Tsinghua has "made statistics of the common sentential forms used for telephone calls. Two hundred and fourteen sentential forms of different commands were collected" to develop the world’s largest Chinese speech database. (38)

Given Nortel’s early involvement in the development of standards in support of the CALEA legislation, it is natural that the first digital switch to reach market, and give service providers and vendors the ability to meet basic CALEA compliance, should be manufactured by Nortel. (39)

The sophisticated DMS Supernode switching technology is manufactured in China through a joint venture with the Chinese government known as GDNT (Guangdong Nortel). At the time, Nortel said of this technology transfer that it "will contribute immeasurably to the development of the Chinese telecommunications industry." (40)

In terms of funding, Nortel invested an extra US$37 million in GDNT (on top of funds agreed in a 1993 Memorandum of Understanding [MOU] with the state planning commission) – an investment that followed hot-on-the-heels of the announcement that the US government would pay equipment manufacturers compensation for the implementation of CALEA. (41)