American authorities targeted the Chinese technology company Huawei because of the company’s successes, said an article of Forbes, a well-known U.S. magazine, on Dec. 10.
This article by op-ed writer John Tamny denounced the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of China’s communications technology giant Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., in Canada at the behest of America early December.
This move on Meng was made on the grounds that Huawei had flouted America’s embargo on Iran by selling telecommunications equipment to this country.
“The federal government is ultimately persecuting Huawei for being successful,” said the article.
While America accused Huawei of doing business with countries it deemed as enemies, U.S. companies had been trading with its enemies all the time through intermediaries, the author pointed out.
Back in the 1970s, despite Arab countries’ efforts to wean the U.S. off their oil, America still obtained Arab oil from third parties. During World War I, the U.S. banned trade with Germany but was actually doing business with it through intermediaries in other countries.
The article remarked that “production itself is a signal of trade with everyone simply because there’s no accounting for the final destination of any good”. Huawei sells so many smart phones and telecommunications equipment that unless this company hoards all its productions, its products will ultimately reach countries like Iran.
Huawei as a successful telecommunications company couldn’t place its products on U.S. shelves due not to its quality, but to a truly suspect reason --- it was viewed as a national threat to the U.S.
Some U.S. politicians claimed that Huawei had close ties with the Chinese government and its products could be used to spy on America.
What they had to offer to underpin this argument was nothing but some vague references to potential spying. One example was a sales deal between Huawei and America’s telecommunications services provider AT&T Inc., which was aborted amid concerns among some U.S. politicians over “national security”.
In the author’s words, the Huawei story was ridiculous, protectionist and dangerous, and the arrest of Meng was truly insane.
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