US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo praised Reliance Jio, Reliance Industries’s telecom arm, calling it a clean telecom company while thrashing China's Huawei as Chinese military-controlled corporation.
Trump administration also said that Chinese video surveillance company Hikvision is owned or controlled by the Chinese military, laying the base for new US financial sanctions.
Hikvision was quick to call these allegations baseless and said they had never participated in any R&D work for military applications but would work with the United States government to resolve the matter.
Pompeo explained how Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio is rejecting working with ‘tools of the CCP surveillance’ state and how tides are turning against China's Huawei, a Reuters report reads. “The world’s leading telecom operators – including Spain’s Telefonica, as well as Orange, O2, Jio, Bell Canada, Telus, and Rogers, and many more – are becoming clean telcos. They are disconnecting from the Chinese Communist Party infrastructure,” Pompeo said.
Other nations turning to cleaner telecom operators include the Czech Republic, Poland, Sweden, Estonia, Romania, Denmark, and Latvia.
He went on to add that, “Huawei’s deals with telecommunications operators around the world are evaporating because countries are only allowing trusted vendors in their 5G networks.” He said that these other companies, too, are rejecting doing business with tools of the CCP surveillance state.
“We’re concerned by Beijing’s behaviour and we’re not the only ones. And he and I talked about that. Our friends and partners are finding their voice and taking action to counter China’s malign activities, particularly in Europe,” Pompeo said.
The US Department of Defence in the meantime released a list of 20 companies operating in the United States that Washington alleges are backed by the Chinese military. This list was shared with lawmakers in a letter titled, ‘Communist Chinese military companies operating in the United States.’
Last September, top US Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer, Republican Senator Tom Cotton and Republican Representative Mike Gallagher in a letter to Defense Secretary Mark Esper, shared concerns about Beijing enlisting Chinese corporations to harness emerging civilian technologies for military purposes.
ALSO READ
- India to soon get 5G-powered ‘smart’ national highways
- Jio BlackRock looks to AI, data analytics and low costs to gain in rapidly growing mutual funds industry
- Meet JioFrames, India's answer to Meta's AI-powered glasses
- Reliance Industries CEO-studded AGM LIVE: Jio IPO news; Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, Bob Iger speech; Ambani address, JioHotstar updates, and more
"The list is a start, but woefully inadequate to warn the American people about the state-owned and -directed companies that support the Chinese government and Communist Party's activities threatening the US economic and national security," Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who sponsored the Uighur bill, said
US-based companies have bought seven out of 10 recent investments amounting up to 19 per cent shares in Jio valued at over ₹90,000 crore. The largest of the investments in Jio Platforms have come from Facebook, which bought 9.99 per cent stake in Jio for ₹43,574 crore.
Mukesh Ambani claims that Reliance Jio is the only network in the world that doesn't use a single piece of Chinese equipment.
