It is easy to trump up a charge against someone. And this is exactly what the United States is doing in its witch hunt of Chinese companies. Once again, it is the claim that a Chinese company represents a threat to its national security that is being used, this time to justify the call to the Federal Communications Commission to revoke China Telecom Corp’s authorization to provide international telecommunications services to and from the US. The US agencies that made the call on Thursday, which include those for Homeland Security, Defense, State, Commerce and the Office of the US Trade Representative, cited “substantial and unacceptable national security and law enforcement risks associated with China Telecom’s operations”. Did they provide any evidence to support this? No, of course not. All they offered was the claim that China Telecom could be controlled and influenced by the Chinese government, and its operations might allow Chinese government entities “to engage in malicious cyber activities enabling economic espionage and disruption and misrouting of US communications.” It seems that something has gone wrong with the mentality of some US politicians, who are obsessed with political confrontation with China. Everything can be associated with a possible threat from China, including business operations. Facts speak louder than words. No matter how hard they try to peddle the notion that the Chinese government is doing whatever it can to sabotage the national security of the US, including using Chinese companies as Trojan horses, they have never come forward with any evidence to verify their claims. While there has been plenty of evidence to show that it is the US that behaves in this way, and the US government that is a national security threat to other countries. If there is any logic behind the US politicians’ obsession with rumor-mongering about a threat from China, it is simply that these US politicians cannot imagine that China would not do what the US does. The increasingly tight control and even ban on operations of Chinese businesses in the US has been narrowing down the space for economic cooperation between the two countries. If the relations between the world’s largest and second-largest economies in trade and other areas are damaged by US politicians’ rumor-mongering about China, it is not just the Chinese economy, but that of the US and the world at large that will suffer. Therefore, they need to be told that they are disrupting the development of the world economy and global governance by pulling the rug out from under the political trust between both countries although there is no sign that they will be rational enough to look at the larger picture of China-US relations and global development. –CN
