“Huawei Death Sentence”: Trump Said To Prepare Executive Order Restricting Chinese Telecoms
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Sat, 01/19/2019
In the media frenzy surrounding Special Counsel Mueller rare statement slamming Buzzfeed’s “report” that Trump had instructed his former lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, an important development in the US-China saga quietly snuck under the radar. Because one day after the WSJ reported a since denied story that the US, or rather Steven Mnuchin, is seeking to lift China tariffs (to boost the market), and on the same day that Bloomberg reported China had offered a path to slash its US trade surplus by importing up to $1 trillion more in US goods, Bloomberg also reported late in the day, that the Trump administration is preparing an executive order that would “significantly restrict Chinese state-owned telecom companies from operating in the U.S. over national security concerns”, the latest escalation at the heart of the ongoing US-China feud, namely China’s ongoing technological theft, pardon, “transfer.”
While the order, which hasn’t yet been presented to the president, does not explicitly mention Chinese telecom giants such as Huawei Technologies or ZTE by name, and would not outright ban U.S. sales by the firms, it would give greater authority to the Commerce Department to review products and purchases by companies connected to “adversarial countries”, including China, reported Bloomberg citing “people familiar with the matter.”
The underlying tension is familiar to everyone who has followed the recent arrest of Huawei’s CFO in Canada, who is pending extradition to the US: Huawei has been pushing to take a global leadership position in 5G, but many American and foreign officials suspect the company’s products are being used by Beijing to spy on Western governments and companies (despite the rare denial by its reclusive founder Ren Zhengfei who said he would “never do anything to harm any country”). Both Huawei and ZTE have also been targeted by the U.S. for alleged schemes to dodge American sanctions on Iran.
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