As the summer of 2011 wound down in the city of Shenzhen, high-ranking executives at the ZTE Corporation, China’s second largest telecommunications equipment company, found themselves strategizing about their American nuisance.  In a series of memos marked “top secret,” they discussed various ways the company might evade American sanctions — the U.S. laws that explicitly bar companies from selling goods containing U.S.-made components to Iran, Sudan, North Korea, Syria and Cuba.