When asked by the South China Morning Post in March about Huawei Technologies’ plans to release new 5G smartphones, deputy chairman Eric Xu Zhijun firmly dismissed such a notion to hundreds of journalists, analysts and clients who attended the US-blacklisted company’s annual conference in Shenzhen.“If you’re expecting to buy a 5G smartphone made by Huawei, [all of us] need to wait for approval from the US Department of Commerce,” Xu said. “We can produce 5G smartphones when they license 5G chips to us.”But it was the company’s launch of new 5G handsets powered by a new central processing unit (CPU) – first identified by Chinese benchmarking website AnTuTu as the Kirin 9000s, developed by Huawei chip design unit HiSilicon – which resulted in intense speculation about where and how the chip was made under strict US trade sanctions.

A third-party teardown of the Mate 60 Pro earlier this month indicated that another US-sanctioned firm, mainland China’s top contract chip maker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), was behind the advanced processor, which prompted US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to seek more information about the 5G CPU in light of existing tech access restrictions. Both Huawei and SMIC have continued to stay mum about the mainland-produced system-on-a-chip (SoC) used on the new Mate 60 Pro series. But that has not stopped a strong outpouring of patriotic fervour on Chinese social media, where netizens have hailed the new 5G smartphones and their advanced CPU as symbolic of China’s victory in defy。