This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 29th, 2018. I'm Kila Brown.

Chinese tech firm ZTE is getting a special deal thanks to the White House and that benefit is challenging national security concerns.

It's also providing a strong argument that the U.S. is a country that today doesn't want to play by well-established

trading rules.

Dan Eekinson directs trade policy studies at the Cato Institute, he comments.

Amid all of this tough talk on China as a not an honest tradesman when it comes to trade in general,

with respect to national security of adopting or I should say

sort of vacuuming out U.S technology and then ending partnerships and then they've got all these technological

innovations that they can make use of in China for export or for military

applications amid all of this, the President says, ZTE, I talked to President

she, we're going to work something out to get ZTE the parts that it needs from the US to build its technology.

What was the state of the debate, the substantive debate, up to that point when we learned that the president was going to make this push to carve

out this exception for apparently one company.

Yeah, so this all has its origins in a US case. The Trump

administration brought a case against China under section 301 of the Trade

Act of 1974 and in in that case, they alleged that the Chinese were stealing U.S. intellectual property,

compelling U.S. companies to share their technology as the price of access to the markets and that China was engaging

in industrial policies that violate their WTO commitments in an effort to sort of bolster their tech sector. Most prominently

there's a program called Made in China 2025 which the Chinese frankly have

been fairly blatant about saying that they are going to do whatever it takes to leapfrog

the United States to get to the technological four.

Now, they're perfectly entitled to pursue those kinds of policies, but if you don't want the United States to get its dander up, you should be a little less aggressive and

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