https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you have specific facts you want to refute, I'd be interested to hear.

I have no way of assessing who is (more) correct.

First of all, the Economist has correspondents all over the globe for their foreign reporting. Virtually every piece about a country is written by a reporter in that country. And reporters covering a country are often foreigners as well. So of course it was written in Shenzhen, this is how all their articles are written. But the Economist is a British publication.

And second, there is nothing propagandistic whatsoever about the article. It's simply reporting the facts of how Huawei has responded to America's sanctions -- at length and in great factual detail.

Here are the concluding paragraphs:

> America’s policymakers are also learning from their mistakes. The gradual ratcheting-up of sanctions on Huawei, and especially the 28-month gap between the announcement of the most severe measures in 2018 and their implementation in 2020, gave the firm lots of time to prepare, China hawks lament. But the bigger lesson from Huawei’s torment has not yet sunk in: that cutting the firm off from Western technology did not stifle it, but instead increased its incentives to innovate.

> China is still years behind the West in chipmaking. Sanctions on high-powered semiconductors have raised costs and slowed the uptake of ai for thousands of firms, as intended. Hubble’s investments are still far from replacing Western lithography machines and other components. But if Huawei was a worry when America first declared war, it is a bigger one now.

This isn't pro-CCP at all. Rather it's pointing out the flaws in how America implemented its policy, and the risk that it's actually backfired in the long term -- and that America might need new and better thinking here for containing China's technological progress.

If you were pro-CCP, you wouldn't want to publish an article like this at all, because you wouldn't want people in the US to even become aware that the sanctions had actually increased innovation within Huawei. As they say, never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake.

As an aside, I’ve become less of a fan of Economist over the years. Not because this article per se, but because they tend to be years late to the obvious conclusion. Which in this case was that sanctions would help Huawei (as most smart people realized within 5 minutes of the sanctions coming out).

Another layer of the onion is the truth values (perceived/cultural truth, "actual" truth, etc) of the respective claims, though that often gets overlooked when it comes to propaganda, or geopolitics in general.