Chinese telecom firm Huawei has turned to partnerships with Chinese companies to bypass U.S. sanctions that have crippled Huawei’s smartphone business.  Once briefly the top smartphone maker in the world, Huawei has been in survival mode since Washington slapped sanctions on the company more than two years ago. The Trump administration said the firm posed a national security threat due to its ties to the Chinese Communist Party.  Its smartphone business took the biggest beating after then-President Donald Trump in 2020 barred its access to critical U.S.-origin technology—including key computer chips needed to power its devices. The company is now largely shut out of the global smartphone market, and its domestic business is hurting as well. Eric Xu, Huawei’s rotating chairman, said in September that the firm’s smartphone revenue could drop as much as $40 billion—or about 80 percent—this year, with new growth streams unlikely to make up for this …