Episode 881: The Prisoners Of The Trade War

By Sarah Gonzalez,

Sarah Gonzalez, Bryant Urstadt, Rob Schmitz

Published December 14, 2018 at 9:52 PM EST

Meng Wanzhou's arrest has caused an uproar.

As President Trump sat across the table from Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 in Buenos Aires, things seemed to be looking up. Their two governments, which have been embroiled in a trade war for months, were agreeing to a 90-day truce.

But 7,000 miles away, the relationship between China and North America would be tested, when Canadian police arrested a woman named Meng Wanzhou. She's the CFO of Huawei, an enormous and powerful Chinese company unknown to most Americans. Huawei sells more phones than Apple. It is the largest telecom equipment company in the world.

To understand the latest turn in the trade war between the U.S. and China, we try to understand Huawei's story. It traces the same trajectory as another, bigger, story: The rise of Chinese-style capitalism.

Music: "New York Love Song."

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Sarah Gonzalez

Sarah Gonzalez is the multimedia education reporter for WLRN's StateImpact Florida project. She comes from NPR in D.C. where she was a national desk reporter, web and show producer as an NPR Kroc Fellow. The San Diego native has worked as a reporter and producer for KPBS in San Diego and KALW in San Francisco, covering under-reported issues like youth violence, food insecurity and public education. Her work has been awarded an SPJ Sigma Delta Chi and regional Edward R. Murrow awards. She graduated from Mills College in 2009 with a bachelorâ

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Sarah Gonzalez

Sarah Gonzalez is a host and reporter with Planet Money, NPR's award-winning podcast that finds creative, entertaining ways to make sense of the big, complicated forces that move our economy. She joined the team in April 2018.

Bryant Urstadt

Bryant Urstadt is the editor of Planet Money, NPR's podcast about economics. Planet Money specializes in taking complicated subjects, finding the people at the center of them, and turning their stories into entertaining narratives. He is part of the team which won a Peabody for reporting on the fake bank accounts scandal at Wells Fargo.

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Rob Schmitz

Rob Schmitz is NPR's international correspondent based in Berlin, where he covers the human stories of a vast region reckoning with its past while it tries to guide the world toward a brighter future. From his base in the heart of Europe, Schmitz has covered Germany's levelheaded management of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of right-wing nationalist politics in Poland and creeping Chinese government influence inside the Czech Republic.

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