Trump says US will discuss dropping charges against Chinese tech giant Huawei in coming weeks
- ‘We’ll be talking to the US attorneys … the attorney general … We’ll be making that decision’, president says
- Trump reiterates earlier comments that he does not want to ‘artificially block people out based on excuses or based on security’
US President Donald Trump said discussions on dropping criminal charges against Chinese telecom giant Huawei will be held in the coming weeks, after the two sides agreed to extend their trade negotiations in Washington for two more days.
In remarks seen as him raising the possibility of using the case as a bargaining chip, Trump said he “may or may not” include Huawei and another Chinese telecom company, ZTE Corp, in the trade deal.
While dropping the charges against Huawei was not currently under consideration, the issue would be raised, he told reporters at the White House during his meeting with Chinese Vice-Premier Liu He.
US and Chinese officials say a trade war deal is ‘extremely’ likely
“We’re going to be discussing all of that during the course of the next couple of weeks,” he said. “We’ll be talking to the US attorneys. We’ll be talking to the attorney general. We’ll be making that decision.”
Huawei and its chief financial officer Sabrina Meng Wanzhou face nearly two dozen charges in the United States, which contends it violated economic sanctions and concealed its business dealings with Iran.
Meng was arrested on December 1 in Canada at the request of the US Justice Department. Although she has denied any wrongdoing, she is currently awaiting extradition proceedings and a hearing has been set for March 6.
A little over a week after Meng’s detention in Vancouver, Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were arrested in China on separate charges of endangering national security.
Chinese Vice-Premier Liu He handed greater clout for Washington talks
According to Xie Maosong, a senior adviser to the Communist Party, the pair’s arrest could be key to securing Meng’s release as early as April.
Speaking on the sidelines of the South China Morning Post’s annual China Conference in Hong Kong on Thursday, he said he was confident Meng would be freed because of the “countermeasures” China had taken to put pressure on Canada.
While the US is planning to issue an executive order that would ban the use of Huawei equipment in its telecommunications networks, and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been ramping up the pressure on America’s allies to do likewise, Trump bucked the trend, saying during the talks on Friday that he did not want to “artificially block people out based on excuses or based on security”.
“I want to have competition with China – fair competition,” he said. “I don’t want to block out anybody if we can help it. We want to have open competition.”
Trade deal will remain elusive if China feels threatened by US demands, analysts say
His comments echoed a tweet from the day before in which he said he wanted the US to “win through competition, not by blocking out currently more advanced technologies”.
The US “must always be the leader in everything that we do, especially when it comes to the very exciting world of technology!”, he said, without mentioning Huawei by name. He said he also wanted “5G, and even 6G, technology in the United States as soon as possible” and “there is no reason that we should be lagging behind on something that is so obviously the future”.
Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei has been in a defiant mood in recent days. While rejecting allegations that his company posed a security threat, he said in an interview with the BBC that there was no way the US could crush Huawei because its technology was “more advanced”.
