Xi Jinping Runs Into Trouble as U.S. Brings RICO Charges Against Huawei | Meng Wanzhou's Four-Page Statement Released | Ren Zhengfei | Yaoyaojiang
The New York court ruled that in the upcoming criminal trial of Huawei, the four-page factual statement signed by Meng Wanzhou in 2021 can be used as evidence adverse to Huawei. This ruling not only undermines Huawei's defense line, but also embarrasses the narrative promoted for years by Chinese officials that Meng Wanzhou had not pleaded guilty, and could become a major diplomatic liability for Xi Jinping during his visit to the United States.
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Hello everyone, I am Yaoyao Jiang. In September 2021, Meng Wanzhou was released from three years of soft detention and flew back to China on a special plane wearing a red skirt with the national flag. The Chinese official narrative framed this as a great victory for the Chinese people, stating that Meng Wanzhou had not pleaded guilty. However, five years have passed. This week, on June 17, 2026, Judge Donnelly of the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, New York issued a ruling allowing the four-page statement document signed by Meng Wanzhou in 2021 to be used as evidence adverse to Huawei in the criminal trial that will begin on September 8 of this year. The date September 8 is also significant because Xi Jinping is scheduled to make a state visit to the United States at that time. What exactly did Meng Wanzhou sign in 2021? What consequences will these four pages trigger after five years? Today we will walk you through a scenario. Here’s a spoiler: the price Meng Wanzhou paid for regaining her freedom back then will be that Huawei remains on the defendant’s bench today.
Judge Donnelly is a judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Since Meng Wanzhou was arrested at Vancouver Airport in December 2018, all major milestones in this case have been essentially in his hands. For eight years the case has never changed judges. The ruling on June 17 addresses a specific issue: the prosecution plans to present the four‑page factual statement that Meng signed in 2021 as evidence to the jury in the Huawei criminal trial scheduled to begin on September 8 of this year. Huawei’s defense team naturally opposes this. Their objections fall into two categories. The first is a matter of identity. They argue that Meng’s case is her own matter, not Huawei’s. Huawei’s lawyers contend that the deferred prosecution agreement Meng signed with the U.S. Department of Justice in September 2021 was intended solely to resolve the criminal charges against her personally. Huawei itself was not a party to the agreement, did not sign anything, did not waive any rights, and certainly did not acknowledge that Meng’s statements were factual. A senior executive’s admission made to secure personal liberty cannot automatically become a corporate confession. The second objection is procedural. You cannot submit Meng’s evidence without allowing us to cross‑examine her in court! Under the confrontation clause of the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, criminal defendants have the right to face adverse witnesses. In a 2004 Supreme Court decision on a different case, the Court held that if a declarant cannot be present for cross‑examination, the statement is, as a general rule, inadmissible. Meng’s four‑page factual statement is an out‑of‑court statement with accusatory character; if the prosecution wants to use it, Meng must appear in court to be questioned by Huawei’s lawyers. The second point might sound as if Huawei wants Meng to appear, but it is not. It is a deeper strategy. China will not allow Meng to fly from Shenzhen to New York to testify, so her statement would have to be excluded as evidence. Thus, what Huawei’s lawyers really want is not Meng’s testimony but to use the requirement that she appear in court to completely remove her confession from the evidentiary chain.
These two arguments were not invented out of thin air by Huawei’s lawyers. On the day Meng signed the deferred prosecution agreement in September 2021, the U.S. legal community almost uniformly predicted that this route would be viable for Huawei. New York economic‑crime defense attorney Roland R. Perell told Reuters at the time that the factual statement could be treated as an admission by a senior Huawei manager, but if he did not appear for cross‑examination, the statement would almost certainly be inadmissible. Another defense lawyer put it more bluntly: if he does not return, no one can cross‑examine him, and the statement cannot be used in court.
Five years later, the judge’s answer is the opposite of the near‑consensus prediction of the legal community at the time. Judge Donnelly’s two sentences knocked down Huawei’s two lines of defense. The first sentence: “Meng Wanzhou was, and still is, Huawei’s CFO.” On its face it sounds plain, but it directly strikes at the heart of Huawei’s identity argument. Federal Rule of Evidence 801(d)(2) provides that a statement made by a senior officer within the scope of his duties is admissible as non‑hearsay evidence against the company. The judge reasoned that when Meng signed the four‑page document in 2021, she was Huawei’s CFO, and the statements described actions she took while performing her CFO duties, so her admission legally counts as Huawei’s admission. The judge’s second sentence: Huawei cannot invoke a corporate right to remain silent to block the use of its executive’s statement because Huawei has, in effect, adopted the statement. The judge noted that over the past five years Huawei never publicly declared the four‑page facts inaccurate, never disavowed Meng, nor terminated her. On the contrary, after Meng returned to China, Huawei gave her a higher position; she is now Vice Chairperson and rotating Chairperson of Huawei. This “vote with the feet” arrangement, under U.S. evidentiary law, is equivalent to the company adopting Meng’s four‑page statement. As for Huawei’s procedural argument that Meng must be cross‑examined, the judge rejected it, reasoning that because Meng’s statement is a party’s own statement, it is already admissible evidence and does not require her to appear for cross‑examination.
What Judge U did on June 17 can be summed up in one sentence: Huawei's biggest trouble is not that the United States found a new witness, but that every word Meng Wanzhou left in the U.S. Department of Justice documents when she tried to leave Canada has become evidence of Huawei's guilt. Placing this ruling in the context of the Chinese-language world reveals a mismatch, because over the past five years the core argument of mainstream Chinese narratives has been that there is no confession in the dream. These four characters have been the most frequent expression in official Chinese discourse since September 2021. From the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the People’s Daily, from CCTV to the Global Times, from Huawei’s official statements to Meng’s own remarks, this point has been repeatedly emphasized. Ren Zhengfei’s line that he would rather not see his daughter than confess became a heroic expression domestically. But “no confession” and “admitting facts” are two different things: a criminal‑law confession, called guilty in English. If a defendant pleads guilty, the court skips trial and goes straight to sentencing. Meng Wanzhou indeed did not take that step. On September 24, 2021, when she appeared in video court, she told the judge she would not plead guilty, which is true. At the same time, she did something else: she signed a four‑page document acknowledging that all the facts written in it were true and accurate, and she signed it promising not to make any statements contradicting the document in the future. Under U.S. evidence law, this action is called a factual statement or factual agreement. Its evidentiary effect differs from a plea of guilty by only one point: a guilty plea results in immediate conviction, whereas signing a factual statement does not lead to direct conviction, but the admitted facts can be used as evidence in all subsequent litigation, and the signatory cannot retract them. This is why the four‑page statement makes the mainstream Chinese narrative uncomfortable. The lack of a confession blocks only a direct conviction of Meng personally, but the facts she admitted in those four pages have been hanging in the Huawei case record for five years as evidence. On September 8, 2016, these facts will be formally transacted. What exactly was written in the four‑page factual statement signed by the grand jury in September 2021, and what did he admit? One must clearly see what Meng’s four pages actually admit. Rationally understand what the Huawei case really is. In domestic mainstream narratives, Meng Wanzhou and the Huawei case are often conflated, and the opponents of both cases are broadly labeled as the U.S., and the charges are broadly described as baseless. However, in the U.S. Department of Justice’s litigation records, these are two separate cases. The Meng case has been concluded; on December 2, 2022, a judge signed off and dismissed all charges against her. But the Huawei case remains! The code for the Huawei case is 18CR457, where “18” refers to 2018. The DOJ’s allegations against Huawei were secretly submitted to a grand jury on August 22, 2018, more than three months before Meng was arrested at Vancouver Airport. The Huawei case did not start with sixteen charges; it was built up in three stages. The first was on August 22, 2018, the initial secret indictment, mainly alleging bank fraud and conspiracy to commit bank fraud—the four charges later faced by Zhou personally. At that time the defendants were primarily Huawei Technologies, Huawei Terminal, the United States, and Meng Wanzhou personally. The core of this batch of charges was that Huawei used SkypeCOM to do business in Iran, settled in U.S. dollars, and through a malfunction in the U.S. clearing system allegedly deceived HSBC and several other international banks to maintain relationships with those banks.
The second instance was on January 28, 2019, when a secret indictment was made public. At the same time, the U.S. Federal Court in Seattle also filed another set of charges against Huawei, accusing it of stealing trade secrets from T‑Mobile. According to a source, there is a robot arm codenamed TAPP used to test phone durability before shipment. Huawei engineers, while cooperating with T‑Mobile, were accused of secretly filming this robot, taking the robot’s finger components back to a hotel without authorization, and sending the Mobile’s engineering schematics to Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen, China. This part of the case was originally tried independently in Seattle but was later merged into the case in the Eastern District of New York.
The third occurrence was on February 13, 2020, which marked a turning point in the case. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a third alternative indictment, raising the count of charges to sixteen. Among the new charges, two were especially significant. The first new charge invoked the famous RICO Act, originally designed by the United States to dismantle the Mafia and known as the anti‑mafia law. Its core feature is that it does not punish a single criminal act but targets an organization’s long‑term, repeated, systematic criminal pattern as a whole. Once an entity is classified as a criminal enterprise under the anti‑mafia law, the defendant is no longer a company that made a mistake but an organized crime group. Applying the anti‑mafia law to a publicly listed multinational technology company is rare in U.S. judicial history, and applying it to a foreign state‑linked technology, technical, or strategic enterprise is even rarer. This is why, after the February 13, 2020 indictment was released, the Chinese government reacted strongly; the political connotation of the anti‑mafia label far exceeds ordinary espionage accusations or trade sanctions.
The second heartbreaking charge is conspiracy to steal trade secrets. In 2020, this version of the indictment expanded the accusations against Huawei. The original version had only T‑Mobile, a U.S. company, suing Huawei for trade‑secret theft; now it involved six companies. In addition to the anti‑mafia law and the trade‑secret charge, the indictment contains factual details, including Huawei’s internal codename “vomit” referring to Iran, and “that too‑North‑Korea” referring to North Korea, as well as accusations that Huawei helped the Iranian government track protesters during the 2009 Iranian anti‑government protests. Of the sixteen charges, only four were directly charged against Meng Wanzhou personally—bank fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, telecom fraud, and conspiracy to commit telecom fraud. The remaining twelve charges target Huawei as a company. Thus, the four‑page factual statement that Meng signed in September 2021 appears to cover only the four charges against her personally, but it also serves as the factual basis for the other twelve charges. Meng’s acknowledgment, at the factual level, effectively touches the entire set of accusations. This is the practical significance of the judge’s ruling on June 17. On April 19 of this year, the case entered a new phase: the Department of Justice voluntarily filed a fourth alternative indictment. This time it reduced rather than added burdens—the DOJ withdrew two charges and removed several entities from the defendant list, but retained the core structure of the case, the anti‑mafia law, and the three most central charges of bank fraud and trade‑secret theft, leaving none of them altered. On April 23, the judge, in a procedural hearing, accepted the simplification and postponed the trial date from May 4 to September 8. At this point, it is clear that the September 8 hearing is not a minor case about Iranian sanctions; it is a major case that characterizes Huawei as a whole, and one of the core pieces of evidence supporting this major case is the four‑page document signed by Meng Wanzhou in 2021. So, what exactly does that four‑page document say?
The factual statement signed by Meng on September 22, 2021, is cataloged in the Department of Justice’s filing system under a low‑numbered CPA, month‑a extension indictment agreement Appendix A. The document is four pages long, and the entire text revolves around one event: what Meng said to senior HSBC executives at a meeting in Hong Kong on August 22, 2013. Let’s first review the background of that event.
In December 2012 and January 2013, Reuters published two investigative reports stating that a Hong Kong‑registered company called SkinCode was operating in Iran and had close ties to Huawei, potentially serving as a channel for Huawei to circumvent U.S. sanctions and sell telecom equipment to Iran. After these reports were released, HSBC grew nervous because the bank had been facilitating Huawei’s dollar settlements for years, and dollar settlements must go through the New York clearing system. If Huawei used SkinCode to bypass U.S. sanctions, HSBC, as the clearing bank, could also be held liable by the U.S. Department of Justice.
HSBC asked Huawei for an explanation, so Huawei arranged a meeting. The representative sent there gave a presentation on August 22, 2013 in Hong Kong; Meng Wanzhou used a Chinese PPT, and a translator beside her translated her Chinese into English for HSBC executives. After listening, three points were made at that meeting. The first point, about the nature of SkypeCOM, said that it was a normal business partner of Huawei, a third‑party cooperating with Huawei, and that the business cooperation between Huawei and SkypeCOM was normal and controllable. The second point, about equity relations, said that Huawei had once been a shareholder of them, but had sold all its shares and reopened all its holdings. The third point, about compliance, Meng Wanzhou said that Huawei’s operations in Iran strictly complied with applicable laws, regulations and sanctions, and that there were no violations of export controls.
These three statements sound like routine corporate talking points, but in a four‑page factual statement, Meng Wanzhou admitted line by line that her explanations to HSBC were false; she lied. The first sentence? It is false: that entity is not a Huawei business partner; SkypeCOM is actually a Huawei subsidiary. The case was registered in Hong Kong, but the actual operation was entirely in Iran, and all board members of that entity were Huawei employees. Those employees used Huawei‑domain email addresses during work. The second point, also false: Huawei did sell its stake in SkypeCOM, but the sale was essentially a transfer to another of its own subsidiaries, so actual control never left Huawei. The third sentence, also false: Huawei, through SkypeCOM’s operations in Iran, violated the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctions. One detail is that Huawei hired a British staffing agency and sent engineers to work in Iran; from 2010 to 2014, Huawei paid that British firm about $7.5 million via Skype accounts at several Asian banks, all settled in U.S. dollars through the U.S. clearing system. At the same time, Huawei’s dollar business with HSBC amounted to roughly $100 million, each transaction cleared in the United States and each covered by the false statements made at the August 22, 2013 meeting. At this point the core of the four‑page document was finished, but the factual statement contained one more item. Investigators found a Chinese document on Meng’s computer titled “Suggested Talking Points.” Its content matched almost word for word what she said at the Hong Kong meeting. The existence of this document changes the nature of the whole incident: it was not a slip‑of‑the‑tongue or an improvised remark; she came with a prepared script that was ready before the meeting and matched exactly what she was to say to HSBC executives. It was a pre‑planned, organized deception.
After the Hong Kong meeting, HSBC asked Huawei to formally submit an English version of the PPT. In September 2013, Wanzhou arranged for a copy of the English PPT to be placed on the desk of HSBC executives, HSBC accepted it, and then decided to continue its banking relationship with Huawei. The document signed by Wen Wan Zhou in 2021 acknowledges the above. Four pages, three false statements, a Chinese document that made the meeting look like a corporate explanation of a commercial misunderstanding, was characterized in a 2021 legal filing as a planned deception to conceal violations of U.S. sanctions, intended to make HSBC trust her statements, continue providing dollar settlement for Huawei, and keep Huawei’s $100 million business in Iran via Skype alive.
The statements signed by Meng Wanzhou on September 22, 2021 were never mentioned in public discourse inside China. Domestic narratives presented a different story. On September 25, 2021, Meng Wanzhou arrived in Shenzhen Bao’an Airport on a Chinese government charter flight and said a few words at the airport. She said, “As an ordinary Chinese citizen, I am proud of my motherland.” She said, “As a hardworking Huawei employee, I am proud of Huawei.” She also said, “If belief had a color, it would be Chinese red.” A WeChat Moments post she made on the plane was repeatedly shared, stating that without a strong motherland, she would not have the freedom she enjoys today. On the same day, People’s Daily published an editorial titled “No force can stop China’s forward march,” which included a line asserting that the U.S. accusations of fraud against Meng Wanzhou were pure fabrication. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection commented that this was a victory of justice and law. CCTV’s commentary said the U.S. attempt to impose guilt could not stand. Xinhua’s editorial called the Meng incident a great victory under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Ren Zhengfei’s remarks were repeatedly quoted; he said he would rather never see his daughter again than agree to a humiliating settlement with the United States through confession and fines. This sentence circulated domestically for five years and was used in many occasions as a symbol of Huawei’s backbone.
Putting these statements together with the specific content of the Meng Wanzhou case creates a strange disjunction. People’s Daily says the accusations are pure fabrication, Meng
Huawei, however, admitted in a four‑page document that he indeed told a senior HSBC executive in Hong Kong those statements back then, and that he indeed lied, with the purpose of maintaining Huawei’s banking relationships. CCTV said that the alleged crime could not be established, while Meng Wanzhou, within those four pages, admitted that his actions met the definition of illegal transactions under U.S. and Iranian trade and sanctions regulations. Ren Zhengfei said he would rather not see his daughter than plead guilty, yet the daughter signed on September 22, 2021, acknowledging all the facts of the four‑page governance. This mismatch is not temporary; from 2021 to 2026, China’s official discourse has not changed. Meng Wanzhou never publicly mentioned the specific content of the four pages, and Meng Wanzhou has not spoken again about anything related to those four pages. Over five years, this narrative speaks of national dignity, great‑power rivalry, and a hero’s return. Abroad there is another narrative about Meng Wanzhou, which focuses on the four‑page legal document, a false‑statement meeting in Hong Kong, and a $100 million bank fraud. Both narratives refer to the same person, the same period, the same event, yet each side tells what sounds like two different stories.
The deferred‑prosecution agreement contains a clause that Meng Wanzhou and her lawyers must not make any statements that contradict the factual statements, nor imply that her entry into the agreement was involuntary, uninformed, or forced; any such statements would constitute a breach, void the agreement, and the sixteen charges would be non‑recoverable. Over the past five years, when we carefully consider the statements made by the Chinese side, only one line remains: “As an ordinary Chinese citizen, I am proud of my motherland,” which does not violate the factual statement she signed. And the testimony that she would rather not see her daughter, technically, is also not Meng’s own words and does not directly contradict the factual statement. In other words, over the past five years, China’s entire narrative has been legally engineered; the appropriate lines are spoken by others, while she only says what does not conflict. This design is meant to walk a tightrope between domestic nationalist demands and the legal obligations of the deferred‑prosecution agreement.
But on June 17, 2026, the judge clarified in the ruling that Huawei had not separated from Meng Wanzhou over the past five years, had not declared his statements inaccurate, and had even promoted him, a clever move that effectively meant the company had adopted that private statement. Consequently, this year the four pages were activated by the judge. Next, we need to go back five years to see how those four pages were signed.
On the afternoon of December 1, 2018, at Vancouver International Airport, Canada, she arrived from Hong Kong on Cathay Pacific flight CS838, preparing to transfer in Vancouver to fly to Mexico City. She held Hong Kong, Chinese, and Canadian passports and frequently traveled worldwide. At that time she was forty‑six, the daughter of Huawei CFO Ren Zhengfei, and ranked twelfth on Forbes China’s list of top businesswomen. About two hours after deplaning, Canadian border officials took her to a room; three hours later, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police appeared and arrested her criminally. The arrest was based on a temporary extradition request sent that morning from the Eastern District of New York Federal Court, with the U.S. Department of Justice asking Canada to extradite her under the relevant treaty.
It is worth noting that when Meng was taken away by the pilot in Vancouver, she had on her person a spring‑loaded phone, a MacBook laptop, an iPad, and another Apple phone. Canadian police, following standard procedure, seized and inspected these electronic devices. Her lawyer later argued in Canadian court that the police had communicated in real time with the U.S. FBI during the seizure and handed over the devices’ access passwords to the Americans. This formed a core defense argument, claiming that Canadian authorities violated procedure by colluding with the U.S. This line of argument was pursued for two years; Meng’s legal team continuously challenged the legality of the extradition process in Canadian courts, each hearing being delayed, each delay pushing the case further back. On December 11, 2018, Meng was granted bail with a $10 million bond; she did not have to stay in a Canadian government detention center and was allowed to live in her Vancouver home. She was restricted from leaving her residence between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., and her daytime movements were limited to the Greater Vancouver area. She lived in her mansion for nearly three years. In the domestic mainstream narrative, those three years are described as “house arrest,” a single term applied retroactively. But the reality is that she was not in a prison nor in a government detention facility; she resided in a $15 million home, with her husband present, could hire a chef, meet friends, order takeout, and attended weekly court appearances in Canada dressed in smart attire. Media footage showed her in stable mental condition, with neat hair and tasteful clothing. Those three years were not the life of a hostage held by a foreign power, but rather a form of high‑end house arrest.
But in stark contrast to the mansion are the other two individuals. On December 10, 2018, the ninth day after his arrest, in Beijing, Canadian citizen Michael Conning was taken away by China’s state security organs on suspicion of engaging in activities endangering China’s national security. On the same day, in Dandong, Canadian citizen Michael Spaffo was also taken away by China’s state security organs on the same charge. In Chinese narratives, these two people were later collectively referred to as the two Michaels and were held in a Chinese detention center, long denied family visits. Kang Kai was kept in a room with lights never turned off for twenty‑four hours, and both endured prolonged interrogations. Chinese officials have consistently claimed that the two Michaels’ case has nothing to do with Meng Wan. However, on the night of September 24, 2021, after the state and the U.S. Department of Justice signed a deferred prosecution agreement, the same day they left Canada on a Chinese charter flight, the two Michaels were released by China from Beijing. They flew on a Canadian government plane back to Toronto, almost perfectly synchronized in time—three people, the same day, two different planes crossing the Pacific—an textbook hostage exchange.
Returning to Meng Wan’s three‑year extradition tug‑of‑war, in August 2021, Meng Wan was about to be approved by a Canadian court for extradition to the United States. Once extradited, he would be transferred from a Canadian mansion to the U.S. federal prison system to face criminal trials on four of sixteen charges, with a maximum sentence of several decades if convicted. Just as the Canadian court was about to issue its final decision, the U.S. Department of Justice proactively approached with a draft deferred prosecution agreement. The negotiation essentially required the U.S. to drop the charges against Meng Wan, allowing him to leave Canada and return to China. The condition was that Meng Wan sign a factual statement acknowledging that in August 2013 he made false statements to a HSBC executive in Hong Kong, and agree that this statement could be used as evidence in any future litigation against him, without recanting. Those four pages are the product of that negotiation.
From Meng Wan’s personal perspective, it was a relatively simple choice: return home to reunite with family, or be extradited to the United States and await trial in a Brooklyn federal prison. He chose the former. On September 22, 2021, he signed the document. On September 24, 2021, he appeared via video conference before a judge, confirming the agreement, and the judge approved his departure from Canada. In the early hours of September 25, 2021, a Chinese government charter plane landed at Shenzhen Bao’an Airport. The domestic narrative begins from September 25 at Shenzhen Airport, with a red dress, a red flag, a fiery speech, and hundreds of people waving state‑owned‑enterprise banners to greet him—this is how the Meng Wan incident is remembered in the Chinese‑language world. But the signature on those four pages was on September 22 in New York, which is the true beginning of the event, and the real drama will unfold on September 8, 2026, when the Brooklyn Federal Court in New York holds its first jury selection. In U.S. criminal trials, jury selection is a fixed procedure. The judge randomly draws a pool of potential jurors from voter registration and driver’s license lists in the Eastern District of New York, administers written questionnaires, then conducts interviews. The prosecution does not want jurors overly sympathetic to Chinese companies, while the defense does not want jurors biased against China. Therefore, in high‑sensitivity cases involving foreign corporations, the selection process usually takes one to two weeks, possibly longer this time because the Huawei case involves organized crime, Iranian sanctions, trade secrets, and bank fraud, making the facts and law extremely complex, prompting the court to be especially cautious in selecting jurors. After the pool is finalized, the trial proper begins.
On the first day of the trial, the prosecution—represented by the U.S. Department of Justice—delivers its opening statement, framing Huawei as an organized, systematic enterprise that has long violated U.S. law. A particularly noteworthy moment occurs when the prosecution discusses the August 22, 2013 Hong Kong meeting, displaying the four‑page document that Meng Wan signed in 2021 acknowledging the factual statement. As the prosecutor reads each line of the four‑page document on the large screen before the jurors, that moment becomes the culmination of all the facts presented today. Huawei’s lawyers can contest the facts, challenge the evidence, and raise procedural objections, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot make the jurors forget what they just saw on the screen, nor can they erase from the jurors’ minds Huawei’s admission of deceiving HSBC.
After the prosecution's closing statement, the defense will deliver its opening statement. Huawei's legal team, led by Z from the well‑known US law firm C, will do several things in the opening statement. First, they will deny the characterization of Huawei as an inherently criminal enterprise, emphasize that Huawei has been subject to US sanctions for many years, and argue that the private‑ownership claim was a dream‑like personal escape clause, not a commitment by Huawei itself. However, the balance of the opening statement will tip toward the prosecution on the first day because the four‑page factual statement itself is already there, signed by Meng Zhou, and the judge has ruled that it can be used as evidence.
After the opening statement, the trial will move into the evidence‑establishment phase. This phase will last several months; the prosecution will summon senior executives from HSBC to testify, call a T‑Mobile engineer, and summon former Huawei employees or partners to explain how Huawei internally used "AR" and "A" to refer to Iran and North Korea. Each witness is required to substantiate the story told in the prosecution's statement. According to the judge's estimate, the entire trial will last four to six months, meaning that from September 8 this year until early 2027, when the jury renders its verdict, the trial will continue uninterrupted until the New Year of 2027.
A huge variable will appear in the middle. Sixteen days after the trial opens, on September 24 this year, Xi Jinping will visit Washington. Xi's visit to the United States was scheduled on May 14 2026; that evening at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Peking University heard Xi host a state dinner for Trump, and Trump extended a formal invitation to Xi to visit Washington on September 24 2026 as a reciprocal visit. After the invitation was sent on May 13, September 24 became the biggest red dot on the 2026 China‑US relations calendar. Throughout the summer, diplomatic teams from both countries will prepare around that date. On September 24, the day Trump receives Xi in Washington, the jury in the Huawei case at the Brooklyn Federal Court may have just taken their seats, and the prosecution may just be beginning to play the four‑page factual statement signed by Meng Zhou in 2021. While Xi is on a state visit to Washington, the most important private‑sector company under his rule, Huawei, will be undergoing a criminal trial in New York. This scenario is awkward in diplomatic protocol and, in political‑science terms, a deep signal.
There is also a coincidence: five years earlier, on September 24 2021, Meng Wanzhou signed a deferred prosecution agreement on video before a judge and left China on a government charter that same day. Five years later, on September 24 2026, Xi is expected to arrive in Washington. Both events fall on the exact same date, making it hard to explain as mere chance in the China‑US relationship timeline. A one‑day coincidence might be plausible; a sixteen‑day window might be plausible; a five‑year gap aligning perfectly on the same day is far less likely. The trial starts on September 8, Xi visits on September 24, the APEC meeting in Shenzhen occurs in November, and a series of political nodes in Miami in December create a complete autumn‑winter rhythm for China‑US relations.
The Trump administration will have an unusual arrangement this time. Since his arrest in December 2018, Trump has never hidden his attitude toward the Huawei case; he publicly said that if it helped a trade deal, he would intervene in the Meng case. He never treated the Huawei case as a matter of judicial independence, but as a trade bargaining chip. However, in 2026, between Trump’s May visit to China and Xi’s September visit to the United States, Trump has not publicly used the Huawei case as a chip, his trade delegation has not put the Huawei case on the negotiating table, and he remains silent about the trial’s progress. This silence itself is a stance, indicating that the Huawei trial will proceed at the Department of Justice’s pace without White House interference. For China, this arrangement is the most difficult. If Trump, as in his first term, openly used the Huawei case as a trade chip, China could negotiate, exchange, or trade; but this time Trump’s silence means the trial that began on September 8 will naturally continue. When Xi arrives in Washington, the Huawei trial will be a sore point for him. It should be noted that, in order to “rescue” Meng, he not only detained two Canadians named Michael but also personally signed over a hundred orders. If the trial that started on September 8 ultimately convicts Huawei of organized crime, Huawei will no longer be merely a Chinese tech company suppressed by the United States, but will be labeled a criminal enterprise by a US court. Once that label is applied, Huawei’s position in markets across Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Southeast Asia will change dramatically. That is why we said at the beginning of the program that Huawei could become the biggest liability of Xi’s visit to the United States. The four pages that Meng Wanzhou signed back then were her personal price for freedom. Five years later, those four pages could become Xi’s biggest trouble on his US visit. That’s all for today.
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