Photo: screenshot from the Chinese Embassy in Columbia

The Chinese Embassy in Columbia said on Sunday that recently, a certain country, purely acting on fabrication and with malicious intent, has been making unwarranted accusations and improperly interfering with a Chinese company's participation in Colombia's public cloud service bidding. Without any factual basis, it has insinuated that the enterprise from other countries pose information security risks, in a clear attempt to introduce exclusionary clauses that would favor its own companies.

Such actions once again confirm a widely circulated saying on the internet: "What someone accuses others of, they have either done themselves or are currently doing,"  said the embassy in a statement on its WeChat public account on Sunday. 

The world is seeing increasingly clearly that the certain country's professed commitment to cybersecurity is false, while its true intentions are to interfere with other countries' data sovereignty and maintain its own cyber hegemony, stated the embassy.

According the embassy, the Chinese government always attaches high importance to the protection of data privacy and security. It has never and will never require companies or individuals to collect or provide data, information, or intelligence located in foreign territories for the Chinese government in ways that violate local laws. 

China has taken the lead in proposing the global data security initiative. If the certain country is genuinely concerned about data security, it could publicly support this Chinese initiative or make similar commitments, said the embassy statement.

The statement emphasized that Colombia has its own regulatory and contractual mechanisms to effectively safeguard national data security. Advancing the reform of the public data cloud platform aims to uphold data sovereignty. 

"We call on all parties to earnestly maintain an open, fair, and non-discriminatory business environment, safeguard fair market competition, jointly formulate universal rules for data security, and promote orderly and free global data flow," stated the embassy.

Global Times