Tsinghua Unigroup’s activities were impossible to comprehend from the perspective of business logic. There were too many Chinese state-owned and state-financed “private equity” firms circling the world’s semiconductor companies to describe this as anything other than a government-led effort to seize foreign chip firms. “Call forth the assault,” Xi Jinping had demanded. Zhao, Tsinghua Unigroup, and other government-backed “investment” vehicles were simply following these publicly announced instructions. Amid this frenzied dealmaking, Tsinghua Unigroup announced in 2017 that it had received new
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