Senators cite progress but no deal on ZTE after Trump meeting
SEVERAL Republican lawmakers said they and President Donald Trump have made progress toward a compromise that would let Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE Corp. stay in business while addressing lawmakers’ national security concerns.
But a White House meeting between the president and Republican members of the House and Senate concluded with no agreement on Trump’s attempt to soften a provision in a Senate defence policy bill that would reimpose a ban on ZTE doing business with its US suppliers. Trump had agreed to lift crippling US sanctions, which threatened to put China’s secondlargest telecom equipment maker out of business, after a personal plea from China’s president, Xi Jinping.
Senators want stronger penalties for the company, which they view as a security threat to the US, while Trump seeks to keep ZTE alive as a bargaining chip in a wider trade spat with China and as the US negotiates with North Korea.
“He wanted to make sure the negotiation that Secretary Ross had with the Chinese over the ZTE matter was understood and it was respected, and particularly given the fact the president is negotiating with China over things like North Korea,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, a critic of ZTE, told reporters after the meeting. He was referring to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.
“I think there’s a path forward to address the president’s concerns as well as national security,” Cornyn said.
“Today, we made serious strides in solving the ZTE issues in the defense bill,” said Senator David Perdue of Georgia in a statement. “President Trump should not have his hands tied as he engages in major negotiations dealing with trade and the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.” ZTE got into trouble in 2016 for violating US laws restricting the sale of American technology to Iran and North Korea. The company agreed to pay as much as US$ 1.2 billion and penalise the workers involved. But the Commerce Department said in April that ZTE violated the agreement, and the agency imposed the seven-year ban — a penalty the company said would force it to shut down.
In May, Trump said on Twitter that he planned to walk back those penalties, and the administration later announced the new deal with ZTE.
Ross told members of the Senate Finance Committee earlier on Wednesday that having US compliance officers on site was an unprecedented achievement. “I think if this had been our original solution everybody would have applauded it,” he said.
Derek Scissors, China analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said “no one would have cared” if it had been the original solution. The problem, he said, was the administration’s flip-flop on the issue.
“Problem 1 is the Commerce fi nding was undone by the presidential tweet,” Scissors said. “Problem 2 is we are pretending ZTE will now be a good actor that US fi rms should sell to.”— Bloomberg