An American ban puts China’s ZTE in peril

TALK of restricting the use of Chinese telecoms equipment in the West is growing. This week the curbs went the other way, when America banned its companies from selling hardware and software for seven years to one of China’s state-owned tech champions, ZTE. On April 16th America’s Department of Commerce said that China’s second-largest telecoms firm had trampled on a settlement reached in March 2017 over ZTE’s illegal shipments since 2010 of American-made technology—telecommunications equipment to Iran...