US on the verge of signing some kind of trade deal with China

US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has said his country is close to signing a deal with China that could lead to an easing of some trade restrictions.

Ross (pictured) said as much to Bloomberg, with the usual caveats about nothing being set in stone. Many media have been reporting their own conjecture about what this could mean for Huawei as fact, but Ross was keen to stress this deal doesn’t affect the ‘entity list’, which prevents US companies doing business with Huawei.

There was some couched optimism about licenses being granted, that would enable specific companies to conduct specific trade with Huawei, but then again the US has been sitting on a bunch of license applications for a while without apparently granting any. Arguable the biggest of these would be one that allows Google and Huawei to work together, thus enabling the latter to install the full version of Android on its phones.

It’s all very well for Ross to insist the entity list and the trade war are unrelated, but US foot-dragging over granting those licenses implies the contrary. Trade wars are a game of chicken in which each side raises the stakes to give them more weight in negotiations. Putting national champion Huawei in existential danger via the entity list is just too convenient a negotiating chip for its to be plausible that the two issues are unrelated.