In another step of trade war between the USA and China, recent days the IEEE officially stated about their restrictions on Huawei.
Compliance with U.S. Trade Restrictions Should have Minimal Impact on IEEE Members Around the WorldIn short:
IEEE complies with U.S. government regulations which restrict the ability of the listed Huawei companies and their employees to participate in certain activities that are not generally open to the public. This includes certain aspects of the publication peer review and editorial process.
IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization
Therefore, the impacts of this restriction is huge, but I think that we need more publishers (globally, except Chinese of course) in scientific areas react the same. For a long period of time, there are shady behaviors of Chinese scientists in stealing ideas or works of Eastern scientists via peer-review and editorial procedures. Basically, based on the scientific ethics, after peer-review procedures of articles finished, drafts of those articles have to be wiped out in order to guarentee privacy. Most of Eastern scientists obey the rules, but Chinese scientists won't.
Only IEEE's restriction is not enough to prevent Huawei steals ideas of Eastern scientists because other Chinese whom don't work for Huawei can steal ideas and share them with Huawei later. It happens around the world, not only in IEEE, but also in so many institutes, universities in Australia, USA, and more nations.
In a nutshell, I think not only the USA, but also European Union should act more determinantly and massively. They should recommend around 20.000 scientific and medical journals (not only IEEE) to launch restrictions on Chinese scientists to review or peer-review scientific articles. Chinese should not be easily allowed to see drafts of important articles.