> Do you honestly think they had 'communist' backdoors to key infrastructure they were selling into the West, to be scrutinised by armies of security engineers? They are not stupid.

The UK used to have a special BT+Huawei+MI6 joint office where the kit was subject to inspection. I never heard of anything confirmed coming out of there, and the thing seems to have vanished from the internet. So I suspect the order to phase out Huawei was similarly politically motivated.