Chinese telecom giant Huawei is not just called a threat. It is a threat.
A few years ago, the Council on Foreign Relations reported that the main concern about the the firm’s tech being expressed by U.S. intelligence agencies “is that the Chinese government could use Huawei to spy.”
U.S. and foreign officials “point to intentionally vague Chinese intelligence laws that could be used to force Huawei to hand over data to the Chinese government…. There are also concerns that Huawei’s 5G infrastructure could contain backdoors that allow the Chinese government to collect and centralize massive quantities of data and give Beijing the necessary access to attack communications networks and public utilities. In 2022, an FBI investigation found that Huawei equipment can be used to disrupt U.S. military communications, including those about the U.S. nuclear arsenal.”
Hard to trust
CFR scholar Adam Segal noted that with 5G, “It’s much harder to separate the core from the periphery” than is true of 4G or 3G cellular networks. “Once you have those risks, you have to trust the company much more. But it is difficult to trust Huawei, given the relationship between companies and the Communist Party.”
The U.S. doesn’t entirely prohibit U.S. companies from interacting with Huawei. But it has imposed a range of restrictions, including “export controls that limit the company’s access to technology, rules that stop the federal government from buying its equipment, and programs to remove its products from existing networks.”
None of this seems to bother the Associated Press, which is running “paid public relations advertisements on X and on the wire service’s own website on behalf of Huawei as the blacklisted Chinese telecom behemoth and the CCP seek influence over a key United Nations tech agency” (Just the News, March 28, 2026).
The AP took cash from the Chinese company to promote Huawei’s efforts to burnish its image as the Chinese Communist Party seeks to influence the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and increase the penetration of Chinese telecoms and networks worldwide.
The paid tweet by the AP—sent on March 12 and now boasting more than 75 million views—highlighted Huawei’s links to ITU and its efforts on the world stage, and a paid article from Huawei published by the AP promoted Huawei’s efforts in AI. The tweets are clearly marked as “Paid advertisement.”
JTN’s report also details efforts by others in the U.S. to promote Huawei, including Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, “a regular at CCP-sponsored forums and on Chinese state media” who in 2018 attacked the Trump administration for acting to mitigate the threat.
Sachs took the standard tack adopted by many enablers of the Chinese Communist Party of treating the threat as imaginary. And anyway, said he, one needs the United Nations Security Council to legitimize any sanctions on such nonexistent threats:
“Sanctions regarding non-national parties…should not be enforced by one country alone, but according to agreements reached within the United Nations Security Council…. The Trump administration, not Huawei or China, is today’s greatest threat to the international rule of law, and therefore to global peace.”
The view, then, is that respect for international law = relegating much U.S. decision-making on security to the United Nations.
Many problems. One, the professor either did or did not recall that the People’s Republic of China is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and would have veto power over any proposed sanction of a PRC-governed company.
Also see:
Congressional Research Service: U.S. Restrictions on Huawei Technologies: National Security, Foreign Policy, and Economic Interests
StoptheCCP.org: How to Thwart China’s Cyberattacks
“Has the Internet of Things captured your imagination? Got a kitchen with appliances that communicate? You’ll be sharing them with Flax Typhoon’s massive botnet.”
National Review: “Jeffrey Sachs, China’s Apologist in Chief”
“Whatever the root motivations of his pro-CCP advocacy, what’s clear is that it would be a mistake to dismiss it as mere crankery. Yes, his comments make for engaging Chinese state-media content, but so, too, do the most obscure Western apologists for the regime. It’s his affiliations with a major university and with the UN that set him apart. Perched prominently on those platforms, [Sachs] expresses views, such as his mass-atrocity denialism, that, though discarded by the mainstream, shape the ongoing debate.”
