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The Facts
The US Commerce Department on Wednesday announced that Seagate Technology Holdings PLC has agreed to pay a $300M fine for shipping more than $1.1B worth of hard disk drives to Chinese tech company Huawei, in violation of US export control laws.
Seagate reportedly sold 7.4M hard drives in 2021 to Huawei, which the US placed on its Entity List in 2019, prohibiting firms from doing business with it without a government license. The sales also violated an August 2020 foreign direct-product rule.
The Spin
Pro-China narrative
Plainly, the US is bullying domestic and foreign companies from doing business with China. America should follow the lead of its counterparts in the EU and around the world in seeking favorable economic ties with Beijing rather than using its status as an economic power to gain an edge.
Anti-China narrative
If the fact that China controls every domestic company wasn't reason enough, Huawei's founder was a Chinese military engineer before building the company, and it is, inarguably, a risk to US national security and the security of Western private companies. US sanctions are for the benefit of the whole free world and its economy, so it's important that companies abide by trade regulations such as these.
