Here's the official statement via James Bottomley

If it is the Huawei guys being removed, the backlash would be stronger even with angry mobs and alleged trolls excluded. There are more Chinese participating in kernel dev than Russians.

A followup message seems to imply that they are unlikely to be removed unless the lawyers explicitly and clearly told them to. For now we can only pray that a removal of Chinese maintainers, which would _almost definitely_ result in a fork of the Linux codebase, won't happen.