US has trouble stigmatizing Huawei as there are no grounds for it to do so: China Daily editorial

For those Western countries looking at the issue objectively, whether to exclude Huawei from their 5G networks is not a question of national security, rather it is a question of whether an inclusive policy is to be followed to allow the development of next generation telecoms networks worldwide.

When asked about the possible security risks posed by Huawei, President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday that he would never look to stigmatize any particular telecoms operator or any particular country. When talking in Germany's Bundestag last week about the need to have high security standards for the expansion of 5G networks, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that blacklisting individual firms was not necessarily the answer to alleviate concerns.

It couldn't be clearer that the national security concerns the United States keeps raising as justification for excluding Huawei from the development of its 5G networks and persuading its European allies to follow suit is nothing but a practice to stigmatize or blacklist Huawei. The ulterior motive behind such a low-down practice is to contain the development of China.

That the US has not presented any evidence so far to verify its claims about the risk Huawei poses to its national security makes clear it is crying wolf.

The unfairness and absurdity of what it is doing is too obvious for its European allies to take the US at its word. Which has prompted it to try and bully them into doing what it wants. But the US' intimidation of its EU allies on the question of Huawei only further exposes the extent to which it is politicizing a business issue.

True, China has a different political and social system. But just as Merkel said, that does not mean that the answer to business competition should be isolation. Neither does it mean a technology company in China poses a national security risk to a Western country.

China's cooperation with the rest of the world over the last four decades, and its contribution to the development of the world economy should be enough to highlight how big a difference inclusiveness makes to how the global economy fares.

The alarmist theories, on which the US is crying wolf to exclude China's technology companies such as Huawei from its domestic market and even stigmatize them as extensively as possible around the world, are groundless.

Disruption of the global supply chain and a significant delay in the development of 5G networks worldwide is what will result from the exclusion policy the US is adopting.

By stigmatizing Huawei and other Chinese high-tech companies and establishing trade barriers against an increasing number of countries, the US is isolating itself from the world, hurting the development of the global economy, and damaging its own economy as well.