Rural telecommunications carriers in the US were given instructions Monday on how to apply for part of US$1.9 billion the federal government has allocated to replace any equipment their networks use from the Chinese telecoms suppliers Huawei Technologies and ZTE. The legal agreement on Friday in the high-profile fraud case against Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, may have helped reduce US-Chinese tensions. But it did little to slow the purge of Chinese telecoms equipment from US systems that Washington has sought in recent years; one part of that campaign, the so-called “rip and replace” reimbursement fund, will begin accepting…