According to China's Coast Guard, Manila's ship had deliberately and dangerously approached a Chinese vessel in an unprofessional manner, forcing it to take control measures, including "boarding inspections and forced evictions."
Oh no! An inflatable boat has approached our large, well equipped vessel! Quickly, we must forcefully board this boat even though it is "dangerous and deliberate," and chop off their fingers! Then we will puncture their boat with our swords, that will show them!
To give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they are trying to stay neutral by publishing articles from various points of view, including the CCP's.
The current version of the OS has been built with open-source Android code to make Android apps compatible for the time being. It is designed to be used in all Huawei’s consumer products, including watches, televisions and vehicle systems, which makes it possible to integrate functions across devices. It is said to have 700m users and 2.2m developers.
The next version of Harmony is expected to drop all Android-linked code.
Harmony OS is an Android fork. Dropping all Android-linked code in an Android fork means removing almost all its code. I'm curious to know if Huawei have indeed developed their own OS, like Samsung's Bada, and if it really contains no trace of Android.
De-googling inherently causes functionality loss on Android because Google provides a lot of basic services via things like the Google Services Framework. It might be best for you to buy something cheap (secondhand Pixel?), install LineageOS, and then see how you like that before committing to something costly like an Xperia, especially since you're coming from iOS.