President Donald Trump has done everything he can to squeeze Huawei over the past year, bringing criminal charges against the Chinese telecommunications company, moving to block it from buying American technology and trying to convince foreign governments to crack down on the company.

Now other Chinese companies are turning to K Street to keep the same thing from happening to them.

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Eight other Chinese companies have spent at least $7.9 million hiring Washington lobbying and public relations firms since last spring, right before Trump cracked down on a different Chinese telecom company, ZTE, according to a POLITICO analysis of disclosure filings. That’s nearly eight times what the same companies spent in the same period a year earlier.

The companies — including a Chinese radio company, a state-owned railcar manufacturer and a maker of surveillance cameras — have hired more than two dozen additional lobbyists over the past year, including former lawmakers and Trump campaign veterans.

The ramp-up shows how Chinese companies, which in the past have been hesitant to play the Washington influence game, are increasingly worried about threats from the Trump administration, as well as Democrats and Republicans in Congress eager to crack down on China. And it’s another sign that Trump’s trade war with China is driving business on K Street.

“It’s sent shock waves,” Amiad Kushner, a New York lawyer who represents Chinese companies in the U.S., said of the administration’s crackdown on Huawei and ZTE.

The willingness of Chinese companies to hire lobbyists has been driven in part by looking at what’s happened since Trump decided to home in on Huawei and ZTE last year.

The Trump administration banned ZTE from doing business with American companies after it was found to have sold equipment to Iran and North Korea in violation of U.S. sanctions. ZTE has responded by spending millions of dollars on lobbying, including hiring former Sens. Joe Lieberman and Norm Coleman and two lobbyists who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign, David Urban and Bryan Lanza, according to disclosure filings.

The lobbying, along with direct appeals from Chinese President Xi Jinping, appears to have worked. Trump agreed to lift the ban — which would have been a potentially fatal blow to ZTE — if the company paid a $1 billion fine and made other concessions.

Huawei’s approach to its own battle with Trump so far has been the opposite — and the company has little to show for it.

Huawei decided more than a year ago that it wouldn’t be worthwhile to lobby Congress or the Trump administration after it was accused of helping the Chinese government spy on users of its equipment, according to a person familiar with the company’s strategy. While Huawei retains a few lobbyists, the company decided to wage the bulk of its fight in the courts and in the press, the person said.

Huawei sued the federal government in March, arguing that a law passed last year singling out Huawei and four other Chinese companies is unconstitutional.

“This sets a dangerous precedent,” Song Liuping, Huawei’s chief legal officer, said at news conference last month. “Today it’s telecoms and Huawei. Tomorrow it could be your industry, your company, your consumers.”

The company also hired Racepoint Global, a Boston public relations firm, in March to help craft its tweets and promote its message, Larry Weber, the firm’s chairman, said in an interview.

It hasn’t made much difference. The Commerce Department last month put Huawei on a trade blacklist, prompting small wireless providers to complain it could cost them hundreds of millions of dollars to replace Huawei equipment on their networks.

While Trump has described the agreement his administration reached with ZTE as “a good deal,” he told reporters last month that Huawei remained “very dangerous.”

William Plummer, a former Huawei lobbyist in Washington who was laid off last year, wrote in a self-published e-book that the company repeatedly ignored its lobbyists’ suggestions to take “a stronger and more timely approach to protecting and projecting Huawei’s brand.”

“Huawei HQ simply didn’t get it,” he wrote. Huawei and ZTE didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Other Chinese companies facing potential threats from Congress and the administration have followed ZTE’s lead and ramped up their spending in Washington.

Hikvision, a Chinese surveillance camera manufacturer that’s partially state-owned, has shelled out nearly $1.8 million to hire Washington lobbyists and public relations hands over the past year, including former Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) and Lanza, the former Trump campaign aide. The administration is considering blacklisting Hikvision and another Chinese company, Dahua Technology, but hasn’t done so yet.

Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit, a Chinese semiconductor manufacturer, has hired lobbying and law firms since the Trump administration blacklisted it last year. The prominent Republican lobbyist Marc Lampkin is among those advocating for the company. Hikvision and Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, a law and lobbying firm that represents Fujian Jinhua, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

DJI, a Chinese drone company, hired the lobbying firm BGR Group in April to offer “strategic guidance and counsel on legislation or regulations that could impact” the company, according to a disclosure filing.

Two security researchers told senators they were wary of DJI’s drones during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing Tuesday. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) suggested a potential ban on Chinese-made drones.

“I think we’re crazy to do business with the Chinese,” Scott said during the hearing. “We ought to be buying American products in every way we can.”

DJI called those concerns baseless in a statement to POLITICO, saying it “gives customers full and complete control over how their data is collected, stored and transmitted.”

Some Chinese companies are still looking for help, according to four people at Washington lobbying and public relations firms that have fielded inquiries from Chinese companies in recent months.

Trump’s crackdown on Huawei has “spooked Chinese companies,” one of these people wrote in an email to POLITICO. They believe “ZTE was able to buy/lobby their way out of trouble and want to be prepared.”

Chinese companies have few allies in Washington at the moment, as Democrats and Republicans alike have expressed eagerness to crack down. Lawmakers slipped a provision into a defense spending bill last year prohibiting government agencies from buying some telecommunications equipment from Huawei, ZTE and three other Chinese companies or contracting with firms that use such equipment.

“It was a complete surprise to us,” said Steve Cragg, a vice president at Hytera, a Chinese radio manufacturer that was named in the bill.

Hytera hired a lobbying firm, Duane Morris Government Strategies, to discover why the company had been singled out. It still doesn’t have any answers, Cragg said.

ByteDance, the Chinese company behind the popular app TikTok, registered its first Washington lobbyist earlier this month. The company declined to comment on why it sought representation in Washington.

BYD Motors, a Chinese electric bus company, and CRRC, a state-owned railcar manufacturer, have added lobbyists in recent months to try to keep Congress from passing bills that would make it harder for American transit systems to buy trains and buses from the companies, disclosure filings show. (Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), whose district include a BYD plant, helped scrap a similar measure last year while serving as House majority leader.)

Lawmakers grilled a BYD official at a House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing last month, during which Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), the committee’s chairman, described BYD as “a company that is very heavily subsidized by the government of communist China.”

Rep. Harley Rouda (D-Calif.), who sponsored the House version of the transit bill, said in an interview that he expected its provisions to be included in this year’s defense spending bill, which is currently making its way through Congress. The bill is necessary to protect domestic manufacturers and address cybersecurity fears, he said.

While CRRC and BYD have lobbied against the legislation, “my sense is they have not had a lot of success,” Rouda said. Neither company responded to requests for comment.

CRRC will try to get the measure stripped out of the defense spending bill when lawmakers reconcile the House and Senate versions, a person familiar with the company’s strategy said, though it won’t be easy.

“A lot of members of Congress have made their minds up about China and all things Chinese,” the person said.

David Beavers contributed to this report.

A defiant Joe Biden on Wednesday refused to apologize for citing two Southern segregationist senators as people he “got things done” with in the U.S. Senate.

Several of Biden’s 2020 Democratic opponents, including Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, who are both African American, have criticized his remarks. Asked by reporters on Wednesday night outside a fundraiser in suburban Washington whether he should apologize, Biden replied: “Apologize for what?” He also said Booker should apologize, saying, “He knows better.”

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The former vice president added that he didn’t have “a racist bone in my body.”

“I’ve been involved in civil rights my whole career,” he said. “Period, period, period.”

While addressing roughly 100 people at the Carlyle Hotel in New York on Tuesday night, Biden boasted about cooperating with two Southern segregationists during his time as a senator while talking about the need to bring people together and “reach consensus” in politics.

“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Biden said, briefly imitating the Mississippi senator’s accent. “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’”

Biden also invoked Sen. Herman Talmadge of Georgia, saying he was “one of the meanest guys I ever knew.”

“You go down the list of all these guys. Well, guess what. At least there was some civility,” Biden continued. “Today, you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”

Biden’s opponents for the 2020 Democratic nomination harshly criticized Biden on Wednesday. “You don’t joke about calling black men ‘boys,’” Booker said in a statement.

“Men like James O. Eastland used words like that, and the racist policies that accompanied them, to perpetuate white supremacy and strip black Americans of our very humanity,” the New Jersey senator continued. “Frankly, I’m disappointed that he hasn’t issued an immediate apology for the pain his words are dredging up for many Americans.”

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted in reponse to Biden’s comments, saying, “It’s 2019 & @JoeBiden is longing for the good old days of ‘civility’ typified by James Eastland. Eastland thought my multiracial family should be illegal.”

Rep. John Delaney of Maryland said: “Evoking an avowed segregationist is not the best way to make the point that we need to work together and is insensitive; we need to learn from history but we also need to be aggressive in dismantling structural racism that exists today.”

Both Eastland and Talmadge were high-profile segregationists in the Senate. Eastland, a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was a plantation owner who spoke of black people as “an inferior race.” Talmadge opposed the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, saying that ‘”there aren’t enough troops in the whole United States to make the white people of this state send their children to school with colored children.”

Biden’s comments about Eastland and Talmadge were widely reported on Tuesday night and Wednesday because the former vice president has allowed limited press access to his fundraising events rather than keeping them closed, as most candidates do.

As he seeks to raise big money to outdo his opponents, Biden spent recent days attending a series of high-profile fundraisers with wealthy donors.

At the same event on Tuesday while speaking about income inequality, Biden said he didn’t want to “demonize” the wealthy and seemed to assure rich donors that their quality of life would not change under his presidency.

“I got in trouble with some of the people on my team, on the Democratic side, because I said, ‘You know, what I’ve found is, rich people are just as patriotic as poor people,’” Biden said. “Not a joke. I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money.”

“We can disagree in the margins,” he said. “But the truth of the matter is, it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living would change. Nothing would fundamentally change.”

Joe Biden has boasted on the campaign trail that he knows how to make government work again, pointing out that he even got things done with Southern segregationists decades ago.

But rather than bolster his image as an effective pragmatist, Biden’s parables of working with long-dead Dixiecrats have started to reinforce two of his biggest liabilities: his age and his record on race.

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A 76-year-old centrist who spent 36 years in the Senate before serving as vice president, Biden was already out of step with the Democratic Party’s left wing, which wants a fresh face, a woman, a candidate of color or at least an unapologetic progressive torch-bearer.

Now, just a week before the first debate of the presidential campaign, the criticisms from progressives and Biden’s opponents have begun to mount. The backlash came after Biden told donors Tuesday night about how he worked with racist lawmakers like Georgia Sen. “Herman Talmadge, one of the meanest guys I ever knew, you go down the list of all these guys.”

Biden, imitating a thick Southern drawl, recalled how Mississippi Sen. James Eastland called him “son”, but not “boy.” Yet they worked together on legislation.

“At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything,” Biden told the group, according to a pool report of the speech by a reporter invited to cover the fundraiser. “We got things done. We got it finished. But today, you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”

But today’s Democratic Party and progressive movement might not be interested in a consensus-builder. The base of the party wants a fighter.

“If you ignore racism and if you don’t address issues of race with racists, then everything is fine, right?” New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said in an interview with POLITICO. “That’s how you work with segregationists: By not confronting the racism and their institutionalization of second-class citizenship and a lack of fully recognizing African Americans.”

In the Trump Era of politics, “civility” has become a trigger word for liberal activists who believe conservatives haven’t been fighting fair. And so the criticism of Biden was immediate: over his record, his rhetoric and a campaign schedule that’s long on high-dollar fundraisers with power brokers, short on attention to the liberal base and shot through with a brand of middle-of-the-road politics of the past.

“It’s 2019 & @JoeBiden is longing for the good old days of ‘civility” typified by James Eastland. Eastland thought my multiracial family should be illegal & that whites were entitled to ‘the pursuit of dead n*ggers,’” New York Mayor Bill deBlasio, a white Democratic presidential candidate who has a black wife, wrote on Twitter.

“It’s past time for apologies or evolution from @JoeBiden,” the mayor wrote. “He repeatedly demonstrates that he is out of step with the values of the modern Democratic Party.”

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, an African-American presidential candidate, issued a press statement blasting Biden for “praising segregationists” and said “you don’t joke about calling black men ‘boys.’ Men like James O. Eastland used words like that, and the racist policies that accompanied them, to perpetuate white supremacy and strip black Americans of our very humanity.”

Booker isn’t the only one who’s advised Biden not to mention segregationists. One Biden campaign source said it has been “a point of contention” with Biden, “but there’s only so much we can do. This is his decision.”

A Biden adviser said the candidate has nothing to apologize for and said the campaign hoped he would be attacked at next week’s debate in Miami.

“This is an election about beating Donald Trump, not being Donald Trump,” the adviser, who spoke without permission from the campaign, said. “If they want to criticize civility and decency and effectiveness, they’re just like President Trump.”

Another source with Biden’s campaign dismissed the criticisms as a politically motivated effort by rivals to gain ground on the frontrunner. The person noted that Biden is popular with African-American voters, many of whom appreciated his time as the loyal vice president to the first black president, Barack Obama.

In a nod to Biden’s popularity with African-Americans, several members of the Congressional Black Caucus stood by him, including South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, who is holding his “famous fish fry” this weekend in the first-in-the-South state where Biden is dominating.

But one young African-American activist said the black caucus is out of touch with the base of the party and young voters of color when it comes to Biden.

“He’s not strong with young folks. He’s not talking to us. He has shown no growth. He is the same person he was a million years ago,” said Nailah Summers, an activist with Dream Defenders, which advocates for young people of color and supported the Florida Democrats’ most progressive nominee ever for governor, Andrew Gillum, last year.

For activists like Summers, the opposition to Biden is rooted not in his bio but in his record, including his authorship of the 1994 crime bill, which contributed to mass incarceration and the disproportionate jailing of minorities.

“Young people faced the effects of the ’94 crime bill in our homes,” Summer said. “People were disappearing from our homes — our parents, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters — and he’s calling it just an ‘overcorrection’. There’s no real apology.”

In addition, Biden had criticized integration-era busing in the early 1970s and for decades supported the war on drugs. He spearheaded a 1984 civil-forfeiture bill with South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, the segregationist who gave the longest filibuster in the chamber’s history to block civil rights legislation in 1957. Biden eulogized Thurmond at his funeral.

Even before becoming a candidate, Biden brought up Thurmond, Talmadge, North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms and Eastland, whose Southern accent Biden also imitated during a speech in January where he delivered a similar message about working with unsavory lawmakers.

Biden recalled that speech how he, as a young senator in the 1970s, called Helms an “awful heartless guy [with] no redeeming social value.” Biden, who was ripping Helms over his opposition to a bill to help the disabled, recalled that he was chastised by then-Majority Leader Mike Mansfield.

“It’s always appropriate to question another man or woman’s judgment. It’s never appropriate to question their motive because you don’t know what their motive is,” Biden said Mansfield told him, explaining that questioning motives and making personal attacks makes it almost impossible to reach consensus in Congress.

Beyond the righteousness of confronting racists, Ocasio-Cortez said she was “absolutely” concerned that Biden’s stances and rhetoric have been too conservative to excite the coalition of young, nonwhite and woke white voters who are energizing the party.

Biden’s refusal to apologize to Anita Hill for the way she was treated in the 1991 Supreme Court nomination hearings for Republican Clarence Thomas is still a point of contention. His reversals on the so-called Hyde Amendment, concerning publicly funding abortions, was controversial.

And, Ocasio-Cortez said, Biden’s penchant for gaffes and insensitive comments — he once remarked about the ethnicity of gas station attendants and had marveled at how “clean” and “articulate” Obama was in 2008 — could also prove problematic.

“Between this, between the Hyde Amendment, concerning comments towards women, towards African-American people — it justly creates anxiety if there’s going to be tone-deaf comments towards immigrants, towards Latin American people, towards LGBTQ communities,” she said.

“One thing I hope we’ve learned from 2016 is that it’s not just enough to speak to Republican voters, we need to speak to people who are so jaded about politicians that they need to believe that someone will fight for them.”

Laura Barrón-López contributed to this report.