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The Federal Communications Commission is investigating several Chinese telecom companies, including Huawei and China Telecom, over concerns that some of them are ignoring restrictions on their operations in the US.
The regulator said it had opened a “sweeping investigation” into Chinese groups that also include ZTE, a big telecoms equipment provider, and Hikvision, the world’s largest maker of surveillance cameras. It is also targeting China Mobile International USA, and the US subsidiaries of China Telecom, and China Unicom.
FCC chair Brendan Carr said the agency believed some groups were ignoring previous US efforts to address security threats from China. The FCC has previously revoked some authorisations to operate in the US, and placed some companies on the “covered list” of groups from which the government cannot buy products because they are thought to pose a security threat.
“We have reason to believe that, despite those actions, some or all of these covered list entities are trying to make an end run around those FCC prohibitions by continuing to do business in America on a private or ‘unregulated’ basis,” Carr said. “We are not going to just look the other way.”
The probe comes as US-China tensions remain high over a range of security and foreign policy issues. The two countries are also engaged in a new trade war after President Donald Trump imposed two rounds of 10 per cent tariffs on imports from China, sparking retaliatory action from Beijing against US agriculture produce and other goods.
In recent years, US concerns about the potential for Chinese telecom groups, such as Huawei, to help Beijing engage in espionage have soared. China insists that Huawei and other companies are not engaging in spying.
Carr, who was recently appointed chair by Trump, said the FCC would determine the scope of the targeted companies’ ongoing activities in the US and would “move quickly to close any loopholes that have permitted untrustworthy, foreign adversary state-backed actors to skirt our rules”.
The FCC has sent letters to the companies seeking information about their operations, and has sent a subpoena to one of the firms.
Carr said the move was the first big action being taken by a new council on national security that he recently set up to increase the agency’s focus on telecom and cyber-related threats from adversaries, but particularly China.
The FCC said it was seeking detailed information about ongoing operations in the US by the companies it was targeting and was trying to determine if the targets of the probe were receiving help from any other companies.
“I’m pleased to see Chairman Carr and the Trump administration taking the fight to Chinese Communist controlled telecoms companies,” Tom Cotton, the Republican head of the Senate intelligence committee, wrote on X. “These firms are little more than fronts for the repressive and corrupt Chinese intelligence apparatus.”
The other targets are two-way radio maker Hytera Communications, Dahua Technology, which makes surveillance cameras, and Pacifica Networks Corp, a telecoms provider and its subsidiary ComNet.
The Chinese embassy in Washington said Beijing “opposes overstretching the concept of national security, using national apparatus to bring down Chinese companies”. Spokesperson Liu Pengyu added: “We oppose turning trade and technological issues into political weapons.”