Huawei rep. rebukes U.S. ambassador’s accusation

In one of the strongest public remarks ever, a senior representative of China’s tech company Huawei on Thursday night rebutted fear-mongering against the company.

In a ballroom in Brussels packed with well over 100 guests, mostly Europeans, Huawei’s envoy to the European Union institutions launched into a robust defense of the Chinese technology giant.

“Recently, Huawei has been under constant attack by some countries and politicians. We are shocked, or sometimes feel amused, by those ungrounded and senseless allegations,” said Abraham Liu, Huawei’s vice president for the European region and chief representative to the EU institutions.

“For example, yesterday, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Mr. (Gordon) Sondland, said (that) someone in Beijing (could) remotely run a certain car off the road on 5G network and kill the person that’s in it. This is an insult to people’s intelligence, let alone the technological experts across the world,” Liu said.

“Excluding Huawei from the market doesn’t mean the network is safe. For example, since Huawei’s equipment is not used in the U.S. networks, is the U.S. having the most secure network? The answer is no,” Liu said.

The company has an excellent cyber security record, Liu said, with its devices being approved by strict reviews by multiple regulators and operators.

Huawei’s partners in Europe include big-name telecoms operators such as Deutsche Telekom, British Telecom, Vodafone, Orange, Proximus and others.

These partners “have publicly endorsed their trust in Huawei. I applaud these sensible approaches,” Liu said.

“Cyber security should remain a technical issue, instead of an ideological issue. Because technical issues can always be resolved through the right solutions, while an ideological issue can not,” he said.

Certain western governments and media outlets have consistently cast doubt over Huawei’s ownership and governance. Liu made it crystal clear that “Huawei is a 100 percent employee-owned private enterprise,” adding that “if we want to pursue our commercial success, we must follow our own business ethics. We have never harmed the interests of any customer or nation.”

Huawei has more than 12,000 employees in Europe, over 70 percent of whom are hired locally, Liu said. In 2018, the company procured goods and services worth 6.3 billion U.S. dollars from Europe.

“For Huawei, Europe has become our second home,” he said, adding that “our success is Europe’s success. Our loss would be Europe’s loss.”