It's also possible that amidst the trade war China vs US, a few people in the US fed a business-oriented outlet about Chinese spying. You can add micro chips in a few Supermicro servers and Bloomberg journalists would eat the story like candy. This would dramatically decrease electronics imports from China, and putting even more pressure for trade talks. See the Vice President's speech yesterday .

I could be wrong. But we had previously paranoia about Japanese corporate spying 40 years ago.