On February 18, China Huawei Company announced that it would abandon the acquisition of certain assets of American Sanye Company, including intellectual property rights. The deal worth only $2 million ended in failure. The most direct reason for Huawei's acquisition failure is that it failed to pass the security review of the US Committee on Foreign Investment. But the deeper reason is that in the field of high-tech products, the United States has always adopted a blockade policy against China.
As we all know, the United States has long established a strict security review mechanism on the issue of foreign mergers and acquisitions of American enterprises. In recent years, some China enterprises have "hit a wall" in the face of this security review mechanism. Huawei's acquisition of Sanye Company is only the latest example.
In this transaction, the most interesting thing is a technical patent of Sanye Company: it can bind a group of computers together to form a more powerful computer. This technology may be called high-tech, but the total cost of closed patents and some assets of Sanye is only $2 million, which attracted the attention of the US Department of Defense, and then the acquisition was stillborn under security review.
In order to prevent Huawei from acquiring Sanye, five US congressmen wrote to members of the Committee on Foreign Investment, Finance Minister Geithner and Commerce Minister Gary Locke, saying that Huawei's acquisition seems certain to lead to the transfer of advanced American computer technology to China, which will bring risks to US national security. In fact, the frustration of Huawei's acquisition is not an isolated case. As stated in the statement of the Ministry of Commerce, in recent years, relevant parties in the United States have obstructed and interfered with the trade and investment activities of China enterprises in the United States for various reasons, including protecting national security.
The case of Huawei's acquisition of Sanye shows the obstacles faced by China enterprises in the high-tech field of the United States and the blockade of China by the United States in the high-tech field. Although the blockade has been put on a legal cloak in many cases, its essence lies in the suspicion and even hostility of the United States towards China enterprises and China, and on the other hand, it is to maintain and consolidate the high-tech advantage of the United States over China. In 2009, American officials indicated that they would relax the export control of high-tech products to China. In 20 10, the United States also indicated that it would cancel the control of exporting C 130 large transport aircraft to China. However, it turns out that this is just talk. This shows that for a long time to come, we should not imagine that the United States will relax its high-tech exports to China.
More than 20 years ago, Confara, director of the Strategic Trade Management Department of the US Department of Defense, once said: "The United States should maintain a leading position in key areas of strategic significance for 30 years, and generally decide to export to China accordingly." Today, this sentence is still the principle of the United States on the issue of high-tech exports to China.
On the day when Huawei announced that it would abandon the acquisition of Sanye, The New York Times commented that the merger was not as simple as it seemed, but part of a broader deadlock between Washington and Beijing, which would have a chilling impact on future bilateral transactions. The so-called deadlock, to put it bluntly, is the lack of strategic trust between China and the United States. As long as this fundamental problem is not solved, the United States will lack the fundamental motivation to relax or even cancel its control over high-tech exports to China. For China, to promote the US to relax the control of high-tech exports to China, on the one hand, it needs to promote strategic mutual trust between China and the United States, on the other hand, it needs to upgrade its own scientific and technological level. With the continuous improvement of China's scientific and technological strength and level, the high-tech blockade of China by the United States will become more and more meaningless. At the same time, the U.S. practice in Huawei's acquisition case reminds us once again that we also need to conduct a security review on foreign mergers and acquisitions of China enterprises. Recently, the General Office of the State Council issued the Notice on Establishing a Security Review System for Foreign Investors' Mergers and Acquisitions of Domestic Enterprises, which, in a sense, is a good start.