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Chinese telecom giant ZTE is in big trouble with the United States government.

Will this push China to finally try to declare independence and semiconductors?

And what should we make of Beijing's new unemployment measure?

Will China start to use

this instead of growth targets to guide economic development? I'm your host, Pete Sweeney, and I'm

sitting here in Hong Kong chatting with fellow columnist Robin Mock and Christopher Bador. We'll start with

Robin. Robin, ZTE just got in a lot of trouble. Can you tell us how much trouble they're in and why?

Hi, Pete. Sure. So ZTE is a huge telecoms equipment maker in China. So they were in a lot of trouble last year because of sanctions violations.

So at that time, they pleaded a deal with the U.S. Commerce Department.

These are sanctions with North Korea, Iran.

Correct, yes.

And so earlier this week, the U.S. Commerce Department has said that they violated terms of last

year's deal and have basically cut off ZTE from American technology and software for seven

years. So this is potentially very devastating for the company because, you know, most of their

products will have some sort of U.S. component, part, or software. So they make phones. So those phones will be

running on Qualcomm chipsets using Android software. Their telecoms equipment will have optical gear

from lots of U.S. companies as well. So this is potentially, you know, crippling for the company.

I mean, it's a really good example of how complicated this trade war is proving to be, right?

I mean, the import export statistics, you know, just kind of logged a phone or something

showing that it left China and went to the States and everything was Chinese. But in fact, you know, these companies are using a lot of each other's stuff. And ZTE is kind of on,

you know, really getting hurt by not being able to buy American stuff. Yeah. So the global supply chain

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