China Suspects US of Spying, Too

We can see how xenophobic American senators are aching to ban Chinese tech giants like Huawei and ZTE because of the thoughts that their equipment could be used to spy on the United States. Now, China is auditing goods from the US for the same reasons.

US legislators for some reason think that since Huawei’s Chief Executive Officer was working for the Chinese military two decades ago, spying is a sure thing. In the meantime, it is clear that it is not about spying, but about trying to protect US tech companies from Chinese competitors, which are normally more affordable, particularly in crucial emerging markets. Media reports revealed that China’s Ministry of Public Security is going to carry out investigation against top American companies over “security issues”. The list of companies under investigation includes IBM, Oracle and EMC. Although there are no Microsoft or Apple in the list, it looks like China is using revelations by former NSA contractor Snowden as the pretext. His leaks revealed that IBM, Oracle and EMC took part in a NSA hack into critical network infrastructure at universities in China and in Hong Kong.

The representative of the China’s Ministry of Public Security admitted in the interview that many of the country’s largest IT systems are dominated by foreign hardware and software companies, but the Prism scandal implies security problems. In case any trade war does erupt, both sides will feel the hurt, because most manufacturing of the United States, like of any other country, is carried out in China, while the latter currently needs to purchase lots of western technology, although there are attempts to curb this.