No Limits by Andrew Small

Author:Andrew Small [Small, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2022-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

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The UK was one of the major economies hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic. By May of 2020, it had become the worst-affected country in Europe, surpassing Italy. While much of this reflected flaws in the government’s response, it induced considerable concern about the level of dependence the UK had demonstrated on China for vital medical supplies and other strategic imports. It resulted in a set of civil service efforts called “Project Defend” that were intended to identify Britain’s main economic vulnerabilities to potentially hostile foreign governments. It would put an even bigger question-mark over Huawei as a result. Then at the end of June 2020, China passed its long-rumored National Security Law for Hong Kong, the provisions of which had been kept secret until China’s rubber stamp assembly approved the legislation. Protests had already been roiling the city for the last year over a new extradition law, but the National Security Law went even further, representing the de facto end of the “one country, two systems” model that had been the treaty-founded basis for the handover of Hong Kong in the first place.

The UK bore special responsibility for the fate of the citizens it gave to Chinese rule under the guarantee that Beijing would maintain the principle. This sense of responsibility was even more acute—even tinged with guilt—among Conservative MPs. It was during their party’s time in government that the agreement with Beijing on Hong Kong’s future was negotiated, signed and agreed. The deep immersion of so many British companies and families in Hong Kong made it seem far closer than for most other countries. As one official put it: “It just feels different—being frank, the situation in Xinjiang was bad already and has got much worse. But Hong Kong is the first case that looks like a real rollback of freedom in an international city that is so familiar to us.”

If the political climate was already looking icily bleak for Huawei, the United States helped to deal the killer blow, a face-saving one for the Brits as it happened. On 15 May, the US Department of Commerce amended a little-known tool, the “Foreign-Produced Direct Product Rule.” The effects were seismic. It prevented

the transfer to Huawei entities of any items produced or developed by Huawei and which are “direct products” of controlled US technology or software, and transfer to Huawei entities of any items that are both produced by manufacturing equipment that is the “direct product” of controlled US technology or software.[25]

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