U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday said the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of China’s Huawei Technologies was lying about his company’s ties to the Beijing government.
Pompeo believed more American companies would cut ties with the tech giant.
The U.S. placed Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. on a trade blacklist recently, effectively banning U.S. firms from doing business with the world’s largest telecom network gear maker and escalating a trade battle between the world’s two biggest economies.
“The company is deeply tied not only to China but to the Chinese Communist Party.
“And that connectivity, the existence of those connections puts American information that crosses those networks at risk,” Pompeo told CNBC in an interview.
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Huawei has repeatedly denied it is controlled by the Chinese Government, military or intelligence services.
Pompeo dismissed Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei’s assertion that his company would never share user secrets.
“That’s just false. To say that they don’t work with the Chinese Government is a false statement.
“He is required by Chinese law to do that. The Huawei CEO on that, at least, isn’t telling the American people the truth, nor the world,” Pompeo said.
Pompeo was asked if he believed more companies would stop working with Huawei
He said: “We do. We’ve been working at the State Department to make sure that everyone understands the risks.”
Pompeo confirmed a New York Times report on Wednesday that China was using high-tech surveillance to set up an intrusive policing effort that could be used to subdue its minorities, including ethnic Muslim Uighurs.
The U.S. accused China this month of putting significantly more than a million minority Muslims in “concentration camps,” strongly condemning Beijing for its mass detention of its Uighur minority and other Muslim groups.
Chinese Ambassador Cui Tiankai told Fox News on Tuesday that those camps were vocational and educational training centres for people with minor offenses.
“These are not community colleges, these are authoritarian re-education institutions and we’ve seen what’s going on in the technology space,’’ Pompeo said. (NAN)
