Three countries and regions, namely, North Macedonia, Bulgaria and Kosovo, have recently signed an agreement to join the so-called “Clean Slate Network” plan of the United States. Since the release of the expanded version of the CleanNet program in early August this year, the United States has continued to lobby or coerce more countries and regions to join the CleanNet alliance, which has a distinctly anti-China flavor. The European Competitive Telecommunications Association (ECTA) previously issued a statement condemning any ban on China’s 5G suppliers for geopolitical reasons, stressing that such decisions can only be justified on the basis of hard facts and warning that excluding specific suppliers will have negative consequences for consumers, businesses and the market.
According to Reuters, the agreement was signed last Friday during a bilateral dialogue between senior U.S. and EU officials on China. The U.S. Embassy in Bulgaria tweeted that the signing of the agreement was “historic,” and declared that Bulgaria had joined “a coalition of countries and companies committed to protecting their 5G networks from untrusted suppliers. Bulgarian Prime Minister Borisov said that the EU had provided guidelines on 5G network security that should be based on fair competition and transparency. North Macedonia Prime Minister Zoran Zaev said the agreement was “vital” for the country’s future prosperity.
The U.S. State Department in August issued further measures to establish a “clean network,” calling for the exclusion of communications companies, cloud providers and mobile phone applications from China, and for more countries to join the program. U.S. diplomats, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have been traveling the world lately, and U.S. embassies have been releasing frequent misinformation, vilifying Chinese high-tech companies and advocating the formation of a “clean network” alliance. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Klatsch also recently warned EU countries Cyprus not to use Chinese 5G suppliers, and accused Chinese 5G suppliers of being unreliable and risky.
In this regard, the Chinese Embassy in Cyprus said on the 24th, this is obviously the United States to engage in lying diplomacy, provocation diplomacy, another example. The embassy denounced individual US politicians for using state power to suppress Chinese companies by any means necessary, noting that what they want is probably not a “clean network” but an “American network”.
“The German Press TV pointed out that the “Clean Internet” plan is against the globalization and connectivity of the world, and as a result, there will be two networks in the world, which is not good for the world economy and politics. The Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung commented that it was absurd to think that the purpose of the CleanNet initiative was to build a digital wall. In the view of the United States Government, infrastructure and applications would be “clean” only if they were largely free of Chinese involvement.
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