At 8:45 AM on Friday, PCMag’s Sascha Segan took to Twitter to express his frustration at the publication’s inability to send a Huawei phone between the company’s offices in New York and London.
“This is totally ridiculous”, an exasperated Segan said. “Our UK writer tried to send us his Huawei Mobile P30 unit so I could check something – not a new phone, our existing phone, already held by our company, just being sent between offices – and THIS happened.”
By “THIS” he meant that the device never made it to New York, but instead ended up right back in London in a plastic bag.
(@SaschaSegan)
According to an article PCMag published documenting the incident, the phone “left London, flew to Indianapolis, spent about five hours in Indianapolis and was promptly returned to London the same day.”
PCMag soon found themselves at the center of a minor international incident and they certainly haven’t missed the opportunity to dramatize it. A follow-up article published Monday finds writer Adam Smith quoting David Canavan, who is apparently the Regional Chief Operating Officer at FedEx Express Europe. According to Smith’s account of a conversation with Canavan, FedEx said an employee “saw the description of the phone on the forms [and] ‘had a panic attack of sorts’.”
You can read all of the various updates and color in the two linked posts, but really, all you need is Segan’s summary, which reads as follows:
A PCMag writer tried to send a Huawei phone from the UK to the US. FedEx refused to deliver it, and sent it back in London, citing the US trade-related blacklist. Later, FedEx apologized and said it ‘mistakenly returned to the shipper.’
There you go. That’s the whole story, pretty much.
This speaks to how hard of a time FedEx is having when it comes to navigating the Trump administration’s Huawei ban without raising the ire of Beijing, which launched an investigation into the company on June 1, after Huawei accused the shipping giant of rerouting a couple of packages headed to company addresses in Asia and sending them to the US instead.
Read more: Congratulations FedEx! You Will Now Join ‘Great Patriot Farmers’ On The Frontlines Of The Trade War
Naturally, China was furious at the PCMag incident, and the Foreign Ministry promptly demanded an explanation. FedEx provided one – sort of.
The company claimed the whole thing was a mistake, and attempted to write it off as an “operational error”. FedEx also stumbled through an awkward explanation of the company’s policy. FedEx will ship Huawei products, but only to addresses that aren’t associated with Huawei itself and its affiliates, which have, of course, been blacklisted by the US. There is no “general ban” on Huawei products, FedEx insists.
China wasn’t buying it, or, if they were, the Foreign Ministry blamed the Trump administration for putting FedEx in a profoundly ridiculous position. “[The] US government abuses the concept of national security and uses the state apparatus to suppress a Chinese company on trumped-up charges”, the Ministry said. “This is the root cause of the problem and the cause of the chaos.”
That’s almost right. The “root cause of the problem and the cause of the chaos” is the man in the Oval Office.
If all of this sounds like an impossibly convoluted situation to you, FedEx agrees. In fact, they agree so much that the company is now suing the Commerce department citing the “impossibility” of complying with Export Administration Regulations.
“FedEx believes that the EAR violate common carriers’ rights to due process under the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution as they unreasonably hold common carriers strictly liable for shipments that may violate the EAR without requiring evidence that the carriers had knowledge of any violations”, FedEx said in a statement on Monday. “This puts an impossible burden on a common carrier such as FedEx to know the origin and technological make-up of contents of all the shipments it handles and whether they comply with the EAR”.
“FedEx is a transportation company, not a law enforcement agency”, the company added.
Incidentally, UPS confirmed to Reuters that they have the same policy with regard to Huawei – that is, they won’t ship to Huawei addresses on the Entity List but do not have a “general ban” on Huawei products.
News that China was launching an investigation of FedEx earlier this month came just hours after Beijing announced the creation of an “unreliable entities list” (essentially, a corporate blacklist of their own). Given the close proximity of the announcements, there was speculation that FedEx was destined to be the first company on the list and, sure enough, the Global Times suggested on Sunday that the company will in fact be added.
The punchline to this laughably ludicrous drama is that Huawei is suing the Commerce department too (for mishandling seized equipment).
Let that sink in. Trump has managed to get the government sued by the highest-profile target of his China crackdown and by a US company that he forcibly deputized to carry out that same crackdown.
There you go, America – the latest episode in the increasingly absurd sitcom that is Donald Trump’s trade war with “Gyna”
