A staff member tests the speed with a Huawei 5G mobile phone at Huawei 5G Innovation and Experience Center in London, Britain, on Jan. 28, 2020. (Xinhua/Han Yan)

A so-called list of "clean" 5G vendors issued by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stinks of McCarthyism, said Chinese analysts on Sunday.

Over the weekend, the website of the US Department of State published what it called a list of "5G Clean Networks" with 27 telecom vendors from Europe, Asia and North America. 

The "clean" vendors can be trusted, according to the US, because they don't include source equipment from Chinese telecommunication equipment providers such as Huawei and ZTE.

Chinese analysts said the list is the latest step by the US in its continued but failing crackdown on Chinese technology firms, amid an effort by the US to decouple from China in the technological sphere, and a global tech race between the world's two largest economies. 

Companies siding with the new type of business McCarthyism in the US risk being listed on China's unreliable entity list, China's legal weapon in-the-making for unreliable foreign companies, experts pointed out.

Ma Jihua, a veteran industry analyst, told the Global Times that aside from South Korea's SK Telecom, the listed 26 vendors are actually a bunch of "juniors" in the world of 5G with "doubtful" technological strengths and rate of deployment.

China is the world's leader in 5G deployment.

China is expected to build more than 600,000 5G base stations by the end of the year, and the shipment of 5G smartphones is projected to reach 180 million units, said an official with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in June.

"It could be possible that by the time they complete their so called 'clean' networks, the world could have moved into the 6G era," Ma said on Sunday.

"McCarthyism has long lost its appeal in the world, and the US' desire to revive the ghost of McCarthyism is a statement of its own incapacity to persuade other countries to move against Chinese equipment providers," Ma said.

"Huawei has neither technology holes nor so-called backdoors, let alone the groundless accusations of its data related to the Chinese government, but the US exactly has all those features," said Shen Yi, a professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Fudan University.

Compared with the large number of IT vendors in the world, the US' selection of 27 telecommunications companies represents only a small portion, indicating that justice and fairness are in the hearts of the majority despite US politicians' enormous efforts to force other countries and companies to take its side, Shen told the Global Times on Sunday.

Shen suggested that if selected IT vendors cut Huawei's orders for no reason and want to remain in the Chinese market, they should feel pain for their poor choices.


Newspaper headline: ‘Clean’ list shows McCarthyism