The latest American attacks on Huawei and other Chinese companies
Business & Technology
- “U.K.-based chip designer ARM has told staff it must suspend business with Huawei,” as the company “believes it is affected by the Trump administration’s ban,” reports the BBC, although it is unclear how far the ban could go — Hal Hodson, Asia tech correspondent for The Economist, suspects in this tweet the news may be “some mistake.”
- “I’m told the U.S. believes it’s close to persuading European nations to exclude Huawei from their networks. Not a legal ban, but an ‘effective’ one,” tweeted Bloomberg’s State Department reporter.
- Hikvision, a maker of surveillance technology, may be the target of a new Trump administration move to prevent it purchasing from American firms. The New York Times says (porous paywall) this “would mark the first time the Trump administration punished a Chinese company for its role in the surveillance and mass detention of Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority.” Dahua is another Chinese company that may be blacklisted, according to the Times.
- Hikvision’s supply chain is “incredibly dependent on U.S. components,” says NPR reporter Emily Feng.
- Drone-maker DJI has denied U.S. Department of Homeland Security accusations that “some Chinese-made drones may ‘contain components that can compromise’ users’ data and share information with servers accessible by the Chinese government,” reports Caixin. It will not reassure Americans that this private company chose to make its announcement in Chinese via the Weibo account of state-owned nationalist rag Global Times.
- At American semiconductor companies, license approvals to hire foreign workers — a separate process from work visas — have slowed exponentially in the last year. The Wall Street Journal reports (paywall) that this “has affected hundreds of jobs across the industry at companies including Intel Corp., Qualcomm Inc. and Globalfoundries Inc., impeding their ability to hire Chinese employees or move existing employees to key projects in the U.S.”
- “CNEX Labs claims a top Huawei executive [Deputy Chairman Eric Xu] was part of a conspiracy to steal its SSD computer storage technology with help from China’s Xiamen University,” according to a separate Wall Street Journal article (paywall).
- Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 has called for “self-reliance” as China grapples with the long-term challenges of the trade war and technology restrictions on Huawei and other companies, reports the South China Morning Post.
