Ban on Huawei Might End After Trump’s Meeting with Xi

By
Victor Fong
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Down here in Singapore we might not feel it as much since it doesn’t directly concern us, but being under the Trump administration is probably like playing a very intense match of ping-pong.

It’s a lot of back-and-forths that nobody knows where the ball will land or where the ball will fly. And the audience sure as hell doesn’t know what is going on in the minds of the players.

For an example of what I mean, Google “trump pull back drone”.

Image: Giphy

So Huawei is basically the ball in this case. We don’t really know where Huawei will land after being tossed around so much. And lest you don’t know what the hell I’ve been talking about, here’s the gist:

Trump says US companies can sell their stuff to Huawei again

Yep. In what Huawei Facts, one of Huawei’s official Twitter accounts, would describe as a U-turn.

Like any great ping pong rally, the ball is still just being passed around. And this time, it’s staying in the air for quite a while.

This happened at the 2019 G20 Osaka summit, held 28–29 June 2019 where 19 countries and EU met. There, Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met to discuss the trade war.

In the words of Trump, “US companies can sell their equipment to Huawei,” as long as the transactions won’t present a “great, national emergency problem.”

And in case why you still don’t know why that is a big deal, almost all electronics are constructed with parts from all over the globe. Huawei’s relies heavily on US companies Intel and Micron for computer chips, other than Google which also supplies Android.

It’s not like the ban affects only Huawei. Micron, for instance, had lost 40% overseas smartphone unit sales after the blacklist. So yeah, the potential U-turn is a good thing for both a lot of US companies and Huawei.

But no one knows if this is a complete U-turn

So, how exactly will this reversal works? We can’t exactly turn back the time, but does this mean that everything Huawei related will be undone?

For one, Huawei is still on the Entity List (aka the blacklist). The US Commerce Department has yet to respond in regards to Huawei.

China-US affairs analyst from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Liu Weidong, said, “On the surface, this might look like Trump has softened his stance on Huawei, but he made no mention about under what conditions he would actually do anything. There has to be a concession he is looking for from China, and that might even be a concession that he knows China will not make.”

Without coming out with the exact terms, it is hard to tell what will actually happen.

This is all part of larger news: US-China Trade

From our side, we mostly care whether our P30 Pro can still zoom in to see ants on the opposite HDB block while still being able to post it on Instagram.

So all these might seem like good news (or the reversal of bad news, depending on your perspective), but there’s potentially bigger news happening here.

Remember the trade-war? Other than Huawei, there were tariffs placed by both the US and China on each other’s exports.

Like the Huawei reversal, this ball is also still in the air. Trump said, “For the time being we won’t be lifting tariffs on China.”

“We will work with China. They are going to negotiate and start spending money.”

Hopefully, the ping pong balls are durable enough to last through all these rallies. And I sure as hell don’t want the ping pong ball to fly towards the audience.

They actually hurt a lot.

Here’s a simplified summary of the South Korea martial law that even a 5-year-old would understand:

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Victor Fong
Email: [email protected]