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US Republican and Democrat Senators said Thursday that they wanted the government to reinstate the penalties on ZTE Corp, despite a Trump administration agreement paving the way for the end of a ban on the Chinese telecommunications company.
Republican Senators Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, and Roy Blunt and Democrats Chris Van Hollen, Mark Warner, and Bill Nelson told leaders of the Armed Services Committees of the Senate and House of Representatives that they were responsible strongly oppose the Commerce Department's agreement with ZTE.
Many US lawmakers, including some Republicans and Trump Democrats, view ZTE as a threat to national security, fearing that the use of its technology in the US could facilitate the theft of secrets by China .
Commerce announced Wednesday that it has signed an agreement with ZTE, China's second-largest telecommunications company, paving the way for a resumption of operations after a ban on doing business with US suppliers for nearly three months
. The company deposits $ 400 million into an escrow account, the Commerce Department said. The ban was imposed in April after ZTE broke an agreement reached after pleading guilty last year in a US federal court for illegally shipping US goods and technology to Iran, in violation of US sanctions
. fears that ZTE, Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and other Chinese companies are beholden to the Chinese government or the Communist Party, increasing the risk of espionage.
They pushed for the inclusion of legislation to reinstate the ZTE ban in the National Authorization Authorization Act or NDAA, a bill on forced pbadage defense policy.
The Senate approved a version of the NDAA with this amendment. But as this is not in the House version of the bill, legislators of the Senate and House of Representatives committees are currently negotiating a compromise.
The fate of the ZTE amendment is not clear. Despite bipartisan support for the measure among congressmen, Republicans control both the Senate and the House, and party leaders rarely break with Trump's policy.
In addition, the representative Mac Thornberry The bill on the defense would prohibit the governmental agencies to use material of ZTE or Huawei.
We are writing to express our firm support for the measures … that would restore the US government's sanctions against ZTE, a state-run Chinese telecommunications company, and modernize the Foreign Investment Committee in the United States " , the senators wrote in the letter, which was sent Thursday.
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