They go to their own government, which is the entity that is supposed to protect them and operate in their interest. If that’s not possible because their government is too much $adjective, that’s on them, not on the US. Peoples have the right to self-determine.
The US are “responsible” in the sense that they have played a role in causing certain eventual outcomes, but are obviously not “responsible” in the sense they should do something about those outcomes. They pursue their own foreign policy agenda, like all other nation-states do. Then the targets of that agenda have the opportunity to respond as they see fit, taking into account the relevant implications and welfare of their own citizens.
Even more so, causing significant disruption to Huawei and putting the Chinese govt in a tight spot very likely was the goal of the entire thing in the first place. Are the US evil because of this? Maybe. However that’s just how foreign policy strategies work. To think otherwise is just naif, or preposterous.
Free trade and competition? As long as it suits the powerful.
Democracy and sovereignty? Only if they play nicely with our big players.
Human rights? If your economic interests align with ours.
It doesn't need to be like this.
If the US conduct here in contravention of the mutually agreed upon World Trade Organization rules, then China should bring a case to the WTO.
Nevertheless, it is stupid, for several reasons.
One is that there are no real reasons to apply sanctions to the companies selected until now and not apply the same sanctions to absolutely all Chinese companies. As the US themselves say, all Chinese companies must obey the Chinese government and they must assist their military if ordered to, so there is no base for banning commerce with only a selected list of companies, instead of banning all.
So the only reason why it can make sense to choose just some companies for the moment is that blocking completely all the commerce with China would hurt more the US than China.
However, for the Chinese companies it is clear that these arbitrary sanctions are not correlated with any behavior that they might try to have in order to be liked by the US in order to avoid sanctions, but as long as they remain Chinese companies they may be sanctioned too at any time. So they have a single exit, to never buy again anything from the US but substitute everything with alternatives.
Sooner or later they will succeed to do that and then the sanctions would not be efficient any more. The sanctions would have been successful only if there would have been 2 possible lines of action for the Chinese companies and it would have been certain that one direction implies sanctions and the other direction means no sanctions.
In that case maybe the US sanctions would have been useful. As it is, they can just annoy the Chinese and force them to give up on buying US products, which cannot be of any benefit for the US.
The second reason why the sanctions are stupid, is that they are hurting the Chinese only because they were sudden and unexpected so they have caught the Chinese off-guard, being still dependent of various components that include parts of US provenience. All this has happened only because the US propaganda has repeated during many decades that the global free commerce is good and that everybody should not waste time and money by producing goods that might be purchased from the US either at a lower price or at a higher quality.
Now all this formerly very successful US discourse has been exposed as a pack of lies, as it appears to have been just a trap conceived to ensnare other countries to become economically dependent on the US, in order to be vulnerable to economic sanctions.
Such a trap can work only once and the time and manner chosen by Trump were not at all the best. Now all countries will try to remove their dependencies on US and the next time when the US might need to have real leverage, for a better reason than now, it will be much less likely to have enough impact.
Sure there is. The justification is that the US should do whatever is the most effective way of retaliating against these practices, even if it means that we pick and choose which companies we retaliate against.
> they can just annoy the Chinese and force them to give up on buying US products
The US is huge customers of many goods and services from china. Us no longing buying certain things from them, could cause them to lose a large amount of business.
> Such a trap can work only once
Nope. The reason being because of the stuff that the US buys from China. That is a large amount of value that the US can continue to chip away at, if there is a reason to do so.
The Trump administration sees buying t-shirts or a pencil from China as less of a risk than high-tech products so they've put export restrictions on components. Though they've put tariffs on more than just high-tech goods. This makes sense because even the manufacture of t-shirts or pencils fuels the economy of China and therefore its tax base and military so sanctioning all products of China makes a lot of sense.
> So they have a single exit, to never buy again anything from the US but substitute everything with alternatives. Sooner or later they will succeed to do that and then the sanctions would not be efficient any more.
China can and should try to do this. Even with all the resources of the state China hasn't yet built a reliable jet engine, let alone leading edge semiconductor plant.
Now they need to do all of this simultaneously. It's very difficult and it's not clear whether they'll succeed at any of these endeavors.
> Now all this formerly very successful US discourse has been exposed as a pack of lies, as it appears to have been just a trap conceived to ensnare other countries to become economically dependent on the US, in order to be vulnerable to economic sanctions.
From what I can tell most countries (like Vietnam and India) are trying to get closer to the US militarily and economically and further away from China.
The only exception is the European Union which was already very close to the US militarily and economically.
"Globalization can be partly responsible for the current global economic crisis. Case studies of Thailand and the Arab nations' view of globalization show that globalization is a threat to culture and religion, and it harms indigenous people groups while multinational corporations profit from it. Although globalization has promised an improved standard of living and economic development, it has been heavily criticized for its production of negative effects. Globalization is not simply an economic project, but it also heavily influences the country environmentally, politically, and socially as well."