To squash the Chinese telecom giant or not — that is the question.
Illustration by Sam Ward
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.
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From Mike Mansfield to Max Baucus and Steve Daines, Montana has been the unlikely source of America’s most influential China-hand senators over the past half-century. But amidst spy balloons, trade wars and mutual paranoia, being a proponent for rational and beneficial relations between the two countries has never been harder.
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