Chinese tech giant Huawei forecast Tuesday that 2020 will be its toughest year ever due to American trade restrictions and warned the U.S. not to instigate any trade restrictions lest they invoke the wrath of the Communist Chinese government.

It said Beijing could hit back against U.S. measures to restrict chip sales to Huawei, by restricting sales of American products in China and by shifting to alternative suppliers in China and South Korea.

“The Chinese government will not just stand by and watch Huawei be slaughtered on the chopping board,” chairman Eric Xu told reporters at the launch of Huawei’s annual report, according to Reuters.

“Why wouldn’t the Chinese government ban the use of 5G chips or 5G chip-powered base stations, smartphones and other smart devices provided by American companies, for cybersecurity reasons?”

The United States alleges the Chinese government could use Huawei’s equipment to spy, an accusation rejected by the company.

Washington placed Huawei on a blacklist in May last year, citing national security concerns, restricting sales of U.S.-made goods to the company. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is also preparing further measures that will seek to restrict the supply of chips to the company.

As Breitbart News reported, integration of Huawei technology in forthcoming 5G networks will enable China to deploy ubiquitous surveillance and control over America and the broader West.

“Huawei is an enormous threat to our national security," @newtgingrich told Breitbart News. “We have to find a strategy to defeat them. I was tweeting about the gap in our big telecoms’ inability to compete." https://t.co/Whs3OIiD5W — Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) March 25, 2020

Gordon Chang, Daily Beast columnist and author of The Coming Collapse of China, outlined such a scenario in an interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

“In London and in many other capitals, China has bought the elites,” said Chang, referring to some Western political elites’ inexplicable decisions to include Huawei [technologies] in telecommunications infrastructure development, adding, “[Huawei] is used by Beijing to spy.”

Chang continued, “If Huawei is embedded in 5G networks, they’ll scoop up the world’s data. They’ll be able to control the world’s devices on the Internet of things. 5G is where much of the future is determined, and we are very, very, very far behind China.”

Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding is another who has offered a similar warning when explaining how Huawei would be used by China to manipulate and surveil Western populations if partnered with Western telecommunications companies and authorities on 5G network development projects.

Huawei has always denied the company can access data through back doors in their networks and claimed it would refuse to spy for the Chinese Communist Party, although that is not a universally accepted claim:

The United States has previously accused the company of lying about its connections with the government in Beijing and popular opinion supports the government’s moves to restrict China’s access to critical technology networks.

Eighty-four percent of Americans believe it is crucial for the United States to win the 5G race against China, according to a poll released in January.

5G Action Now, a newly created advocacy group established to fight for the rapid deployment of 5G technology, released a survey that found while 80 percent of American registered voters remain optimistic about how 5G can improve their lives, 84 percent contend the country must win the 5G race for the country.