Pompeo's fact-twisting China speech versus the truth

17. Mike Pompeo: Huawei is not an innocent telecommunications company but a national security threat to the US

False.

Fact check: Over the past three decades, Huawei has grown from a small company to one of the world's largest telecommunications equipment suppliers, providing quality services to over 3 billion people in more than 170 countries and regions. The company has brought enormous business opportunities to the global telecommunications industry and won a good international reputation. Each year, Huawei makes nearly 80 billion US dollars of purchases globally from 13,000 suppliers in more than 140 countries. Purchases from the US alone was nearly 19 billion dollars.

-- Huawei strictly abides by local laws wherever it operates. The company has long been expressing its readiness to sign no-backdoor and no-eavesdropping agreements with any country, set up cybersecurity testing centers and open itself to testing. This is enough to prove Huawei's innocence and transparency. So far, not a single country, a single company or a single individual has been able to produce solid and conclusive evidence to prove that Huawei poses a security threat to them. Huawei funded a cybersecurity testing center in the United Kingdom and opens itself to testing by UK experts. No other companies in any other country could do this, and no US companies could act in such an open and honest way.

-- Huawei owns a total of 87,805 patents worldwide, of which more than 90 percent are invention patents, including 11,152 core ones granted by the US authorities. According to the latest statistics from German market intelligence company IPlytics, Huawei has declared the largest number of 5G essential patents, accounting for 15.05 percent of the total number of declarations. The Patent Index 2019 of the European Patent Office suggested that Huawei was its top applicant that year, with its declared 5G essential patents outnumbering all US companies.

-- The US government has, with no factual basis at all, abused state power to willfully oppress and sanction Huawei under the pretext of national security. This is nothing short of economic bullying. For the United States, the so-called national security is nothing but a code name of hegemony.

-- In an analysis titled Huawei and the Mantra of Security published on July 20, 2020, Xulio Rios, director of the Spanish Observatory of Chinese Politics in Spain, said the repeated use of national security to discredit Huawei looks like a good story. He mentioned that the truth behind the US pressure on its allies to block Huawei is that "Huawei's technology is highly competitive and places China ahead in the marketplace." They are trying to curb China's development by classifying Huawei as a "security" threat.

-- Jeffrey Sachs, the economics professor at Columbia University, agrees that targeting Huawei is never simply a security concern. "The US concocted in my opinion, the view that Huawei is a global threat," he said, noting that the US has leaned very hard on its allies...to try to break the relations with Huawei. "The United States lost its step on 5G, which is a critical part of the new digital economy."

-- According to US media reports, the US Rural Wireless Association (RWA) estimates that 25 percent of its members had Huawei or ZTE equipment in their networks. Replacing the equipment would cost 800 million to 1 billion US dollars, which means certain US rural areas may lose basic communications facilities. Banning the purchase of Huawei and ZTE equipment or services by rural operators, as advocated by some in the US, could end up harming the interests of American businesses and consumers.