[guiltygatorade]

How about we put it this way: Both Chinese and US consumers lose when their respective governments engage in arbitrary protectionism. You can find his comments "ironic" all you want, that doesn't mean his complaint doesn't have any merit.

It's like if Kid A complained about how getting bullied by Kid B's older brother sucks and you're like HA your complaint is laughable and insane because Kid A's brother is a bully, too!

If you presented evidence on why it's reasonable to suspect Huawei for being complicit in espionage in their hardware devices (and why other countries don't seem to be that worried about it), then you'd have a compelling counterpoint.

[aroman]

There is tremendous evidence. Here are some of the first search results for "Huawei espionage":

[1] Former head of CIA: Huawei engaged in espionage for Chinese state:

https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0719/Former-head-o...

[2] Huawei spied, US federal jury finds:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/huawei_spied_us_jur...

[3] U.S. Suspicions of China's Huawei Based Partly on NSA's Own Spy Tricks

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/us-su...

I agree entirely with your point that there is fault on both sides here. That's precisely what makes it ironic (see [3], in particular!). A better analogy would be that Kid A is bullying Kid B, and in response, Kid B starts bullying back. Ideally, this causes Kid A to "get a taste of his own medicine" and stops bullying Kid B.

That's how I hope the situation will end up, at least.

[guiltygatorade]

Right, your cited sources would actually be a more sound counterpoint than your original comment. Maybe it was just a spur of the moment thing. I guess my point is that if you want to get across the point that Huawei's comments are ironic, then attacking from the angle that there's good reason for AT&T to pull out of the deal and for the US govt to be suspicious would be much more effective.

The Kid A vs Kid B isn't really the situation here as it's the CEO of a company from country A complaining about country B influencing the decisions of a company from country B. That's why injected the bullying older brothers to help with the analogy. If Huawei actually screwed over AT&T in the past and now AT&T pulls out of a deal with Huawei and Huawei complains, then the Kids A/B bullying each other would be an accurate analogy.

Incidentally I've seen the Chinese government basically hype up problems or impropriety of foreign companies (e.g. Apple) in the past in order to bully them in to compliance. I'm not saying that the US government is doing the same thing to Huawei here, but the cynic in me also isn't ruling that angle out either :/