The polarizing ban intervening in the United States private sector that President Donald Trump signed earlier this week and effectively banned Huawei from doing any sort of business in the country will inevitably cause “significant economic harm” to America, the Chinese firm said in a brief statement sent to media outlets following the White House’s latest effort to control domestic trade.
A spokesperson for the Shenzen-based conglomerate argued the newest executive order doesn’t serve anyone’s interest in the long term, explicitly stating Huawei is entirely opposed to the initiative authorized on the behest of the Bureau of Industry and Security, a unit within the U.S. Commerce Department. Huawei is predicting the ban will eventually impact “tens of thousands” of U.S. jobs and wreak havoc within its supply chain to the point of disrupting international relations with China, primarily due to the fact the company is still the biggest telecom equipment manufacturer in the world, as well as the number-two smartphone maker, trailing only behind Huawei.
Needless to stay, Huawei’s statement is nothing more than a pro forma reaction to the newest development; the company is neither expecting the Trump administration to back down from the move anytime soon nor does it believe a hit to Washington-Beijing relations is anything the White House is particularly concerned about. After all, antagonizing China has quite possibly been the most consistent policy of this cabinet since it took office in early 2017.
Sure, Huawei did vow to seek immediate legal remedies to counter the ban but the stateside judicial system generally doesn’t stand in the way of the executive’s interventionism when such actions come alongside formal justification of preserving national security. Due to that exact same reason, most industry watchers give Huawei essentially zero chances of successfully suing the U.S. government for discriminating against its products and services. The company filed for litigation earlier this year, not long after its Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada upon request of the American DOJ. Its legal team argued Washington has zero evidence of any sort of spying against American entities being conducted on the part of Huawei because no such thing ever happened, either on the behest of China’s communist administration or on its own.
Regardless, with the firm being repeatedly labeled a national security threat due to its close ties to Beijing, a scenario wherein it sees even the smallest of legal victories against the American government is extremely improbable.
While the executive order signed by the President on Wednesday marked one of the rare few occasions that saw Washington prohibitively intervene in the 21st-century private segment, it’s far from unexpected; last summer, Congress approved a spending bill with a late amendment barring federal agencies and contractors from pretty much the same thing: buying or licensing any sort of technologies either made and merely associated with Huawei, with the only difference being that the original order specifically mentioned the Chinese firm by name, in addition to hitting ZTE, another telecom and consumer electronics firm from the Far Eastern country, with identical sanctions.