Of course they had only a minor effect, since they were always postponed to some future date. [1] The sanctions weren't intended to be crippling and harsh, but to threaten becoming crippling and harsh unless China makes certain concessions. So long as the concessions remain on the table, the sanctions remain off the table.

[1] Currently February 16, 2020 apparently: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/us-government-postpo...

The primary issue has always been a concern of supply-chain governance for critical infrastructure, i.e. carriers networks. The US doesn't have any of these concerns about European 5G equipment manufacturers because they are close allies. The US has a high degree of confidence that the governments of Sweden and Finland aren't going to pressure Nokia or Ericsson to compromise the support or supply-chain of US 5G infrastructure.

It would by now be more worrying if he didn't.

But I guess "chinese spies eat telecoms babies" is a much more dramatic headline...

Even if you believe the worst about China and Huawei, it wouldn't make the slightest bit of strategic sense for them to implant backdoors into products now, when marketshare is still small and growing rapidly. You'd add the backdoors once you had network dominance, like the US did.

I don't think the US is innocent either, of course tech that we use internally and export is probably backdoored out the wazoo.

I would rather assume almost everything I use is backdoored one way or another, and operate that assumption, rather than assume the opposite to be true and be wrong.

It's not a dramatic headline. Governments spying on each other and their citizens is the boring default state of the things.

Those tests have usually identified several issues, and Huawei has been slow to address them. For example, one of the conclusions of the 2019 report [1] was that "No material progress has been made on the issues raised in the previous 2018 report" Some of these issues are known vulnerabilities in old versions of dependencies like OpenSSL that Huawei has forked and then neglected to update.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/huawei-cyber-secu...

I highly doubt this. So far, what China has done is producing lower cost equivalent to products already developed by other nations. I don't see how China is leading the pack in terms of innovation, here.

Beside, I don't think we can consider smart phones to be "high technology" anymore. The market is saturated with them and the innovation has slowed down massively since a couple of years ago.

I do not see that stopping.

The US outspends the next 7 countries in defense, combined.

Regarding actual economic sanctions are a very effective weapon in US Foreign policy.

Aside from it's military might, the US is one of the biggest players in the global economic market. That allows it to wield incredible leverage.

The "National Security" concern (economically, technologically, capability and integrity-wise) is at the carrier level. Think Cisco, not iPhone.

https://cntechpost.com/2019/12/13/china-made-operating-syste...

Sounds flawless...

It's not quite Tin Foil Hat time, but I also wondered: if the chinese government had tried to ban foreign OSs and force a homegrown equivalent it would have been resisted at home and abroad it would have spurred (real) sanctions and possibly upset the (lucrative, strategically valuable) hardware supply chain.

Trump doing it was a great way for the Chinese government to get what it wanted without looking like the bad guy (it might even be able to play the victim, especially at home).

Given the predictability of these outcomes, one has to wonder: was Trump incompetent (he expected a different outcome) or was he serving a different agenda (maybe a trump hotel in Beijing is about to be approved?).