Name: Donald Trump's U-turn on Huawei - what did he actually mean?
Uploaded: 2019-07-09T04:09:26.000Z
Duration: 1 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Another twist in the long-running saga of what is going to happen to Huawei.

This time, it was Donald Trump meeting Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 in Osaka, where the two presidents discussed bringing an end to their long-running trade war.

Investors were pleased to see the warm words the two men spoke following the meeting, thinking that it might mean that there will soon be an end to the escalation in tariffs.

But what really delighted Silicon Valley, in particular, was what Donald Trump said about Huawei.

He said that American companies would be allowed to sell to the Chinese telecom's equipment maker, after all, just weeks after his administration announced there would be a ban on them doing exactly that.

Since then, however, confusion has reigned over what the president meant.

His economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, was on the television the very next day saying there will be no blanket amnesty for American companies, but there might be a few additional exemptions to the ban granted.

What's clear, talking to people here in Washington, is that the president didn't necessarily know exactly what he meant, either.

Mr. Trump will meet senior officials over the coming days, here in DC, to discuss how they might go about easing restrictions on American companies selling to Huawei, while not undermining their central argument that the Chinese company poses a threat to US national security.

Most people in the technology industry expect that they will eventually be able to sell consumer goods to Huawei, but perhaps not items for super-fast 5G broadband networks.

Good news, perhaps then, for Google with its Android operating software on Huawei phones, but less so for Intel and other makers of sophisticated 5G microchips.