State Media: ZTE Court Win ‘Inspiring’ Chinese Companies to Abuse U.S. Legal System

China’s state-run Global Times on Wednesday celebrated the end of Chinese telecom giant ZTE’s probation in the United States as an “inspiring” victory for Chinese Communism against the American legal system, and urged more Chinese companies to take advantage of U.S. courts to wage lawfare against American trade policy.

ZTE made a plea deal in 2017 for charges of violating U.S. sanctions on Iran. The deal included paying almost $900 million in fines and accepting five years of monitored probation. ZTE was accused of some fishy activities during those five years, but on Tuesday a U.S. District Court judge decided not to treat a pending case of visa fraud as a probation violation, clearing the way for ZTE’s probation to end on schedule on Wednesday.

The Global Times could scarcely believe the U.S. would allow its own court system to be used as a weapon against government policies. Since undermining U.S. and European sanctions as an instrument of international relations is a top item on the agenda of the genocidal, slave-taking Chinese regime, the state newspaper urged other Chinese companies to follow ZTE’s lead as quickly as possible:

While hailing the verdict as a piece of good news and a helpful result for the tech giant by abating external auditing, analysts also said that the lawsuit offers a lesson for domestic tech companies like Huawei, inspiring them on the need to play hardball amid a US crackdown and seek technological independence from US containment. 

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Experts also noted ZTE’s handling of the crisis reminds people of Chinese tech companies’ resilience and abilities to resist crackdown, as their business was not weighed down by US sanctions, but instead developed even better. 

“In 2017, many Chinese were shocked when they learned about the incident, an earthquake in bilateral ties, and feared that more Chinese tech companies would be slaughtered soon by the US, but it did not happen and Chinese people’s perception of the US and bilateral ties has turned more confident in the past years,” Lü Xiang, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.

Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei, leaves home to attend what is expected to be the final day of her extradition hearing at B.C. Supreme Court, in Vancouver, on Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP)

The Global Times applauded ZTE for being “well-prepared, calm, and unyielding in handling unfair U.S. treatment” and urged other Chinese corporations to follow their example. The takeaway for the Chinese Communist paper’s stable of “experts” was that ZTE should not have paid any of the fines demanded by the U.S. Commerce and Treasury departments or agreed to a plea deal in the first place.

The Global Times further touted the supposed victory of another Chinese tech giant, Huawei, against a U.S. “crackdown” as an inspiring example.

“Some believe the company won over the U.S. government after its chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou returned back to China in 2021,” the article asserted, without mentioning the detail that China got Meng out of house arrest in Canada by taking several Canadians hostage.

The Global Times worked ZTE’s court victory into a broad rebuke of America’s effort to hold Beijing responsible for the coronavirus pandemic and hailed it as a sign of Chinese authoritarianism rising in power over decadent Western democracy. Most importantly, it applauded Chinese lawyers for “maturing in terms of launching countermeasures against U.S. crackdowns.”

After spending a thousand words blasting U.S. sanctions and “crackdowns,” the Global Times applauded China’s “Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law,” which “allows China to take countermeasures against foreign individuals and entities involved in discriminatory measures.”

The implied warning was that no Chinese district court judge would ever dream of handing a Get Out of Jail Free Card to any American business that lands on Beijing’s “unreliable entity list.”

Bloomberg News noted Wednesday that the 2017 case against ZTE was a “template of sorts for subsequent actions against Chinese tech giants,” including Huawei, and that ZTE was allowed to conclude its probation even though the judge found substantial evidence that the company did indeed commit visa fraud while the probation was in effect — facts which, taken together, fuel China’s sense that it just scored a major victory over U.S. policy in the battlefield of U.S. courtrooms.

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