News emanating from Taiwan indicates that Chinese tech giant Huawei may have been forced to cancel the launch of its flagship phone and smartwatch in Taiwan after Taipei imposed a temporary ban on some of its products for listing the island as part of China.
Huawei was billed to launch the flagship Mate 30 Pro and Watch GT2 in Taiwan but it announced the cancellation via a post on its official Taiwan Facebook page citing “supply issues” without elaborating further.
The company thanked all those who participated in the pre-order event and apologized for the inconvenience the cancellation may have caused. The company also hinted that users would be refunded, an indication that the ban won’t be lifted anytime soon. Considering Beijing’s and Taipei’s shaky political relationship, it is unlikely that the ban will be lifted soon.
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THE GENESIS
Taiwan’s National Communications Commission (NCC) had slammed a temporary ban on three (3) Huawei models last month after it was discovered that the models listed the self-ruled, democratic island as “Taiwan, China” for timezones and contacts. The models are the Huawei P30, P30 Pro and Nova 5T and the NCC noted that the ban is still in force as the company had yet to change the wording.
China considers Taiwan as part of its territory and has vowed to seize it by force if necessary, even though the two sides have been governed separately for the last seven decades. In recent years the authoritarian mainland has ramped up diplomatic and economic pressure on Taiwan since President Tsai Ing-wen was elected in 2016 because her party refuses to recognize that idea that the island is part of “one China.”
Huawei has previously come under fire in mainland China for not labelling the cities of Taipei, Hong Kong and Macau as part of China in some Chinese-language settings.
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(source)
