Attack on Huawei shows Washington real creator of risks and vulnerabilities: China Daily editorial

According to a document that United States Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel circulated to the three other commissioners last week, the FCC will ban approvals of new telecommunications equipment from China's Huawei Technologies and ZTE in the US on national security grounds.

Without equipment authorizations from the FCC, the two companies will not be able to sell new equipment in the US.

"The FCC remains committed to protecting our national security by ensuring that untrustworthy communications equipment is not authorized for use within our borders, and we are continuing that work here," Rosenworcel said in a statement on Thursday.

In fact, it is just doing what is expected of it by the country's anti-China policy planners.

This was made clear when, also on Thursday, the government of the United Kingdom handed out a legal notice, called a designated-vendor direction, to officially enforce its ban on new Huawei 5G installments and completely eliminate the company's equipment from UK networks by the end of 2027. Although the government extended the deadline for the telecom companies to remove Huawei equipment from their 5G mobile network cores, where some of the most sensitive data is processed, from January to December 2023, the notice sent to the 35 UK telecoms network operators "puts the government's previous position to remove Huawei kit from UK 5G networks on a legal footing" as the UK's Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport said.

The government said it extended the January 2023 deadline to "balance the need to remove Huawei as swiftly as possible while avoiding unnecessary instability in networks" and said the decision to maintain the ban had been reached following technical security analysis from the National Cyber Security Centre which "takes into account our specific national circumstances and how the risks from the US sanctions are manifested in the UK."

And that clearly identifies where the real risks lie. It is the US' bid to contain China, not just its technological progress, but also its development more broadly, that is the real creator of risks and vulnerabilities to peace and people's livelihoods and well-being.

As the UK government states in its "designation notice" to Huawei setting out the reasons for its decision, "concerns over the quality of Huawei's products and services have been exacerbated by sanctions imposed by the United States against Huawei. These sanctions have led to changes to the manufacture of some Huawei products which may have reduced their reliability and made it harder to remedy any deficiencies".

It is the US' attempts to maintain its technological hegemony and strike every potential challenger that have forced the UK to sacrifice its own interests.

The US has long been intent on "abusing state power to maliciously attack Chinese telecom operators". Viewing them as a potential challenger to its technological hegemony, it is trying to strike them down as it has done to the technology leaders of other countries in the past.

By the time it pressured the UK to ban Huawei, it had already repeatedly introduced sanctions on the Chinese company, ordered its chip producers not to sell their products to Huawei, and even illegally restrained the personal freedom of Huawei's Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou for more than one year.

As well as the UK, the US has been pressuring its other allies to ban Huawei from their networks as well.

Huawei has stressed that it has worked with its partner networks for the last 20 years and been subject to a high level of scrutiny with regard to security, and nothing malicious has ever been found. But it seems that is not enough to win it a stay of execution in the markets of the US and its allies where the anti-China hawks now hold sway.