Apple's ambitions are being curtailed by US and Chinese rivalry

This reasoning sounded a bit convenient at the time. Huawei could jump through all the security hoops it liked, but it would never be able to “prove” its innocence. Meanwhile, America was able to diminish the companies that might once day threaten its own technology industry.

In hindsight, it is clear from America’s own behaviour that it has good reason to be suspicious. Last year’s revelations about the amount of data America’s National Security Agency collects via Google, Apple, Facebook and others laid bare how prolific such spying has become.

The NSA “scandal” stopped Washington from being able to take the moral high ground, but it also gave weight to its argument that foreign technology could become a vehicle for espionage. When, in May, the US Justice Department took the unprecedented step of suing China’s People’s Liberation Army for stealing corporate secrets, there was little debate about whether this could be true. Instead, cybersecurity experts alleged that America must have engaged in a little spying of its own in order to gather the evidence.

None of this is to say that China does not carry blame for the escalating tension. It has responded to the US government crackdown on Huawei and ZTE with eye-for-an-eye vigour, going against the grain of globalisation by seeding some kind of technological nationalism. Beijing has banned government officials from buying antivirus software from American companies such as Symantec Corporation and Kaspersky Lab, and blacklisted Microsoft’s Windows 8 software for use in low-energy computers. By banning Apple products – the iPad and the MacBook among them – it has gone for the jugular.

Given the revelations of the past 12 months, it seems unlikely these gadgets are never used for spying (the same could be said for pretty much any smartphone, computer or tablet). But the ban on Apple products is also symbolic. This is, after all, the biggest technology company in the world, and – for a period in the not so distant past – the biggest public company full stop.

However, as Beijing is well aware, much of Apple’s success is staked not on the US, but on China. Millions of its products are assembled in Foxconn factories just down the road from Huawei, by workers who are relatively well paid by Chinese standards but who still only take a tiny sliver of Apple’s income.

At the same time, the company is looking to China’s rapidly emerging middle class to buy its products and help sustain its fantastic momentum. Tim Cook, chief executive, has said it is one of Apple’s top strategic priorities to gain a stronger foothold in China, and that the country will eventually surpass the US to become the most important market of one of America’s most important companies.

That ambition will never come to pass if Beijing and Washington continue in their tit-for-tat war of blocking technology produced in each other’s countries. Between them, they are drawing up an old world map for technology, where products’ potential is limited by geography, and geography limits innovation.

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