 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. In the immediate coming months, considering the nature of the sanctions that are being imposed and considering, say, the shortage that may take place as far as supplies are concerned, what is Huawei's strategy look like specifically and China's in a general sense in the short to maybe even medium term? Yeah, that's a good question and one that I think is difficult to answer with any degree of certainty given how many moving parts there are, how contingent in many ways the development of the trade war and the tech war is on political circumstances indeed within the next couple of months that are hard to foresee now. You already have the somewhat surprising development, I think, at the end of July, or sorry, the end of June of Trump, again unilaterally as he does these things, sort of loosening a lot of the very, very stringent restrictions on sales by US firms to Huawei of key components like, for example, microchips where China's own productive capacity does indeed lag by about 5 to 10 years, what would be required to actually domestically produce cutting edge chips that are competitive in material terms with what's produced in the US and that really more than anything else I think was the move by the United States that would have and still very well could be intended to completely kneecap Huawei's global market position and so that part of it is sort of up in the air at the moment. There's really not much I think in the immediate term that China can necessarily do, unilaterally to rectify that simply because of the present state of US monopoly in that department and that's not the only sort of front or angle in the US assault on Huawei though. The other is sort of taking advantage of the platform monopolies that are headquartered in the US basically in order to mount another assault on Huawei's market position, which is essentially by putting Huawei on the entity's list with which Google, for example, is unable to do business substantially. It means that, for example, Gmail, the entire Google Play Store and so on are not available and they're not interoperable with Huawei phones and so I think this is really laying bare the extent to which these platform monopolies, Google, Apple, the various platforms that they own, Microsoft now, which we're seeing with TikTok, they are arms of the US imperial projects and when it comes down to it, this vision of an open internet is just a mirage. The extent of their penetration and their monopoly presence at a global level are, to borrow a phrase from Mike Pompeo, tentacles of US influence that are still quite powerful. In the sort of immediate term, what Huawei does have to fall back on for certain is still the Chinese domestic bit. I believe its own supply of microchips can still last for about six to nine months maybe, should those export restrictions be reimposed as they might at any moment. It's not without reason that the CEO of Huawei, as well as in fact Xi Jinping himself, referring to sort of the broader situation that China faces now, is analogizing the coming months and years to a new long march because we are entering into a phase of actual economic siege in some ways, at least at the at the commanding heights of global technological infrastructure. In terms of building out its own domestic technological stack, China is pursuing this strategy quite deliberately, but again that is a process that has to take place over ultimately five to ten years. In the immediate terms, there will be real losses and retrenchments that will be necessary. But I think that China's leadership has a clear eye view of the situation and it understands as well that because all this is taking place in a broader geopolitical context, where US hegemony is fraying at least, it's not necessarily under immediate existential threat, but certainly with the broader COVID-19 pandemic, with sort of self-inflicted injuries in many ways that Trump in particular has caused to the smooth functioning of the US imperial apparatus, that China can pursue as well this broader strategy of deepening a counter-hegemonic block. For example, the Bell and Road Initiative, which will at the very least create a fairly reliable common market in some ways among global South countries that will allow it to sort of weather the storm. Absolutely. And to come back to the issue we're talking about in terms of the strategy just to be pursued over the next five to ten years, so what would you see as some of the key pillars? You also again written about the Made in China 2025 initiative is one of the key components. So could you maybe talk a bit about that as well as what would be some of the pillars of this strategy for the next five to ten years? Absolutely, yeah. So to get maybe a little bit more into the weeds of Made in China 2025, this essentially was a plan first laid out in 2015 for China, I stated before, to move up the value chain to sort of escape what is referred to conventionally as the middle income trap, which very much is an epiphenomenon of world imperialism where countries that start out in the formally colonized or semi-colonized periphery stay there because of the very intentional strategy through trade policy and through the world financial system of maintaining this highly unequal international division of labor. China essentially sees a number of critical technological sectors as being the linchpins for its own plan to escape that trap. And these include, for example, AI, just telecoms infrastructure in general, aerospace, green tech as well, where as I think is fairly widely known now, China's investments have far outstripped what we see in any other country, essentially to establish a position wherein acknowledging the overall logic of the global capitalist system, which either China nor any other country, even if it wants to, is in a frontal position to sort of overthrow its entirety at the moment. All of that is I think one key component of the medium to longer term strategy. And as I mentioned before, another is to establish by means of the Belt and Road Initiative, the creation of essentially a reliable sort of trading ecosystem that is to the extent possible outside the dictates of the very much Western dominated global trade regime, world financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. And in addition to the sort of major infrastructural investments in countries, for example, throughout Central Asia, South Asia, Africa and the Middle East that are most strongly associated with Belt and Road per se, China as well, I think plays a key role in terms of building up the technological level and productive capacity of countries that are specifically targeted again because of their geopolitical independence from the United States by US sanctions regimes, including, for example, the DPRK, Cuba, Iran. We can't forget, of course, that the arrest of Huawei's CFO, Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver was done very transparently at the behest of the United States and that the charges that were levied against her were the violation of US sanctions against Iran. And so again, these are all components of a broader strategy that recognizes that China's own sort of capacity for continued sort of self-driven technological investment cannot rely entirely on the building of a domestic market, though that is sort of the foundation and in some ways it's what companies like Huawei that are under quite overt assault by the US tech war have to fall back on. But longer term, this kind of global South-South cooperation is absolutely key to that sort of strategy as well. And yeah, as I said, that sort of broader geopolitical strategy is inseparable from the sort of more domestic focus that made in China 2025 and all these initiatives are often sort of perceived as having in the West due to this conception of China as sort of a rising and like hyper-nationalist power, which really, you know, what it amounts to is a tremendous act of projection by Western commentators of, you know, the developmental model that was pursued by countries of the imperial core, which is quite nakedly colonialist and imperialist, and indeed, you know, was shot through with the same kinds of protectionism and indeed of, you know, theft of technology and of wealth in general that they are now accusing China of.