And just like that, US President Donald Trump, speaking on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan has made truce with Chinese technology giant Huawei.
With this development on 29 June, Saturday, Huawei has now been allowed to deal with US technology companies, ending a two-month long saga. Having said that, Trump is not yet willing to remove the Chinese telecom giant from a trade blacklist, which won’t be decided until the end of the trade talks.
This half-hearted decision could ensure that Huawei can continue making new devices, with support from the likes of Qualcomm, Intel and Google as well. However, the fate of the company still hangs in a balance in the ongoing US-China trade battle.
The permission granted to Huawei to work with US companies is confined to mobile devices, and anything that doesn’t involve sale of equipment that could pose a threat to US national security, Trump mentioned.
The decision is likely to have been made after both Trump and Chinese President Xi Xinping held discussions.
It’s fairly evident now that the US President was looking for a good deal with the Chinese regime, and he’s kind of used Huawei as the bait to get things his way.
By not entirely taking Huawei off the blacklist, he’s played into a win-win situation for technology companies suffering from the ban in the US, as well as the Chinese technology giant. Both the countries are expected to hold another round of meetings to clear up the pending trade deal conditions in the coming days, which could work either way for Huawei and its partnering companies.
Just to recap the whole episode, on 15 May, Trump had blacklisted Huawei with a national security order. The US had publicly asked its allies to steer clear of using Huawei products over concerns that the equipment could be used by the Chinese government to obtain private information.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)