American officials routinely point out that Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, “China’s Steve Jobs,” was a former Chinese PLA officer, and warn that Huawei’s equipment is riddled with Chinese backdoors. Chinese intelligence could use that access to intercept high-level communications, vacuum up intelligence, wage cyberwar, or shut down critical services in times of national emergency. That all may very well have been true. But it is also certainly true in reverse. Even as American officials were publicly accusing China of embedding trapdoors in Huawei’s products, my Times colleague David Sanger
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