Effective May 16th, the Trump administration placed Chinese tech company Huawei on the entity list, meaning no American company can sell products, hardware or software, to Huawei without government permission. In addition, the presumption of the administrators of the list is that permission will be denied.
Being on the entity list seems to mean no Intel or ARM-based microprocessors for Huawei-built computers and telecom equipment, and no Android software for its cellphones.
The US had already been putting pressure on US telecoms, big and small, as well as allies around the world not to purchase Huawei offerings, especially of next-generation telecom infrastructure equipment–a difficult sell, given that Huawei products are better and cheaper than EU or US alternatives. But the entity list move is a huge escalation. It seems to pretty much put Huawei out of business unless/until it develops alternate sources of supply.
It seems to me that this decision is qualitatively different from taxing Chinese products entering the US. The near-term effects are likely to be strongly negative for Hauwei; long-term consequences, in contrast, are likely to be strongly negative for the US, in a number of ways:
–by saying the US will not tolerate significant Chinese competition in tech industries, Mr. Trump is reframing a dispute about terms of trade into a struggle for cultural/economic dominance. Arguably, this is what is really going on anyway, but making it explicit gives China a cause to rally around
–Beijing’s response to the Huawei decision will presumably be to try to jump start its domestic chip business, an area that is (oddly, to my mind) totally unimpressive despite having been a national priority for decades. The obvious course for the US today, it seems to me, is to retrain workers and improve our education system, with emphasis on STEM subjects. That, of course, is a non-starter for both major political parties
–US tech companies must now begin to think about whether they are American enterprises (meaning: willing to forgo Chinese business as/when Washington dictates) or multinationals based in the US. This may not be a burning issue for mature US firms like Microsoft or Google, although Washington’s white supremacism and nativism are already compelling companies like this to locate research centers outside the US (either because the US will not admit accomplished foreign scientists or they fear for their safety). For startups, however, Mr. Trump is making a compelling case that, say, Canada is a better place to establish themselves
–tech companies of all stripes will have to think long and hard before building new manufacturing capacity in the US
Pre-Huawei, one main consequence of the Trump trade strategy has been to substantially weaken the Chinese status quo’s resistance to shifting that economy away from low value-added exports. With developing economies, such resistance is, in my experience, an almost insurmountable obstacle to progress. Huawei gives Beijing a clear mandate to create a high-tech component industry, however. Making it a victim of malign foreign influences only increases its power, given China’s century of humiliation (at foreign hands) historical narrative.
Taking Huawei off the entity list, which the administration now seems to be in the process of doing, does not, I think, return us to the status quo ante. The barn door has already been opened.
So far as I can see, the US stock market has not reacted negatively to what I consider to be a collosal blunder. Wall Street does continue to deal with the possibility of more tariffs principally, I think, by focusing on firms it sees to be the most immune–software, especially cloud-based, and potentially industry-transformative new market entrants in a variety of fields.