Editorial | Cool heads needed as China and US face-off hurts firms even more
- Investigation into why FedEx diverted confidential Huawei documents comes at a time when Beijing is drawing up its own ‘unreliable entity list’ in response to measures by Washington
Imagine if a Chinese courier diverted sensitive and confidential documents from an American company under suspicion in China to Beijing. The outcry from Washington would be deafening.
Accusations of spying for Beijing would surely be levelled. However many apologies and explanations made, no American politicians would be convinced otherwise that the courier wasn’t spying for the Chinese government.
In reality, the courier was FedEx and the customer involved was Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant that is being targeted by the US government. For FedEx, doing it once might have been an accident, a logistical mistake, as the company has claimed.
Doing it multiple times, and each time diverting the documents back to the United States, beggars belief. The State Post Bureau has announced an investigation.
The US delivery services giant must cooperate and provide a full account. If the mistakes were genuine, FedEx’s reputation for reliability needs to be questioned. If they were made deliberately, you have a US company working for its government against a foreign customer. Either way, FedEx deserves punishment commensurate with its wrongdoing.
The bureau has not linked its investigation to the escalating trade war between China and the US. That is as it should be; the probe is more than justified and should stand on its own.
