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posted by janrinok on Wednesday June 20 2018, @12:26AM   Printer-friendly
from the but,-but,-I-promised dept.

The United States Senate has passed an amendment that reinstates the ban on Chinese telecoms concern ZTE doing business with US-based companies.

President Trump said he’d secured a reversal of the ban as a personal favour to Chinese president Xi Jinping in the hope that the show of good faith would ease trade negotiations between the two nations. ZTE was banned from dealing with US firms for flouting laws about exporting to Iran and North Korea. The ban cut ZTE off from critical component-makers like Qualcomm and led to it shuttering production lines and resellers dumping its products.

Trump's plan to have his friendship with Xi ease tensions appears not to have worked, in the short term at least, because the Trump administration today issued a statement that said “China apparently has no intention of changing its unfair practices related to the acquisition of American intellectual property and technology” and therefore threatening tariffs on US$200bn of Chinese goods.

The threat came after Trump last week announced tariffs on $50bn of Chinese goods, sparking retaliatory tariffs on about $35bn of US-made goods from China.

All of which doesn’t look like that personal favour worked out as planned.

Back to the ZTE vote, as it saw US Senators from both sides of politics decry the removal of the ban on grounds of national security. A joint statement from senior Republican and Democratic senators read: “We're heartened that both parties made it clear that protecting American jobs and national security must come first when making deals with countries like China, which has a history of having little regard for either. It is vital that our colleagues in the House keep this bipartisan provision in the bill as it heads towards a conference.”

And there’s the rub, because the US House of Representatives has passed a version of the same bill without the ZTE ban. Reconciling the bill may yet see ZTE given a lifeline, although the Senate vote passed 85 votes to 10 so there’s clearly not much will for a reversal.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Wednesday June 20 2018, @02:19AM (1 child)

    by frojack (1554) on Wednesday June 20 2018, @02:19AM (#695420) Journal

    Well played. Get to be the good cop while talking to the Chinese, and still NOT lose any bargaining chips.

    Bout time those guys in Congress get with the game plan. Better to let Congress play bad cop for a while.
    They think they are winning. Chuckle.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @02:51AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @02:51AM (#695427)

    How do you suppose that Trump is colluding with the D team?

    It seems more likely to me that Trump went off script, and the real ruling class is correcting it.

    The only way we can correct for that is to vote out the 85 senators that voted to pass the bill.

    Both the R teamers and the D teamers need to participate in this.