Arrest ails China-U.S. trade relations
WASHINGTON — If trade ties between China and the United States had a Facebook page, this week’s relationship status would surely read “It’s complicated.”
Even more so now: investors, barely over the market-roiling mixed messages out of last weekend’s supposed tariff detente between President Donald Trump and Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping fretted anew Thursday at the arrest in Vancouver of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies Ltd.
Huawei, of course, isn’t just any tech firm. It’s China’s largest mobile phone maker, the crown jewel in Xi’s national IT ambitions, a privately held juggernaut with projected 2018 sales of more than $102 billion (U.S.) that has already overtaken Apple in smartphone sales and has Samsung squarely in its sights.
And Meng isn’t any old executive; the daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, she’s described in some circles as “corporate royalty” in China. On TV and social media, commentators likened her arrest to the detention in China of a Mark Zuckerberg sibling or a cousin of Steve Jobs. Authorities in Canada, who detained Meng at the direction of the U.S., were tight-lipped, citing a publication ban requested by Meng herself.
In Washington, Department of Justice officials also refused to comment. But The Wall Street Journal has reported that U.S. authorities are investigating Huawei for possible violations of U.S. sanctions on Iran. Trade experts warned against tying the arrest too closely to the trade tensions.
“I don’t think it’s in anyone’s interests to conflate the two,” said Patrick Leblond, an international trade expert and senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. After all, the Chinese can hardly point fingers when it comes to detaining people from other countries, he added.
“This is something that the Chinese do too, and I know on the Canadian side we’ve tried to keep these things separate, so for now, I would expect it would remain like that. But who knows?”