The Ren Zhengfei Response
See how the Founder of Huawei, Ren Zhengfei, is handling Trump's new move with Huawei: we do not really care if you now want U.S. firm to resume supplying technologies to Huawei.
In China, such fine distinctions seem lost in translation. Behind the Great Firewall, Trump’s peace offering has been widely dismissed as empty rhetoric. In an interview with the Financial Times, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei—who only weeks ago acknowledged that being placed on the U.S. blacklist would whack $30 billion off Huawei’s bottom line—scoffed at Trump’s overture saying it would not have “much impact” on his business. In recent days, there have been a flurry of reports in both the Chinese and Western press suggesting Trump’s zig-zagging on Huawei has mainly succeeded in galvanizing China to seek to eliminate its dependence on U.S. technology.