From 5G to TikTok, 2019 was a tumultuous year for tech as the US and China squared off over a host of issues

It has been a tumultuous 12 months for many Chinese technology giants, including telecoms behemoth Huawei Technologies and TikTok owner ByteDance, both of which are at the centre of increased Sino-US tensions. We have taken a look at how some of these tensions might play out in 2020, but before we leave 2019, here is a round-up of some of the key developments in the past year:

New to the list this year were more than a hundred Chinese entities, including Huawei, surveillance device makers Hikvision and Dahua, and artificial intelligence unicorns like SenseTime and Megvii. Huawei was added to the list on national security grounds, which the firm contests, while the surveillance and AI firms were sanctioned for breaches of human rights after allegations that China used the company’s surveillance technology in its crackdown on Uygur and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

Huawei, the world’s largest telecoms equipment supplier and second biggest smartphone vendor, made headlines late last year after chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Vancouver at the request of Washington on charges of bank fraud. Being added to the Entity List has meant Google closing access for Huawei to Android operating system updates and several popular apps, such as Gmail.

Ren Zhengfei, the billionaire founder of Huawei, broke years of silence and talked to more than 20 mainstream foreign media outlets in 2019, defending the company’s compliance and technology record. Despite the export ban imposed in May, the Trump administration has permitted US companies to keep selling certain products to Huawei, which it says is intended to minimise disruption for its US customers.