China
announced an initiative on Tuesday to establish global standards on data
security, saying it wanted to promote multilateralism in the area at a time
when “individual countries” were “bullying” others and “hunting” companies.
The
announcement, by State Councilor Wang Yi, comes a month after the United States
said it was purging “untrusted” Chinese apps under a program dubbed “Clean
Network”.
China’s
initiative calls for technology firms to prevent the creation of so-called
backdoors in their products and services that could allow data to be obtained
illegally, as well as for participants to respect the sovereignty, jurisdiction
and data management rights of other countries.
It
also calls for participants to not engage in large-scale surveillance of other
countries or illegally acquire information of foreign citizens through
information technology.
It
did not detail the nature of the initiative or say whether any other country
had joined.
“Global
data security rules that reflect the wishes of all countries and respect the
interests of all parties should be reached on the basis of universal
participation by all parties,” Wang said.
“Some
individual countries are aggressively pursuing unilateralism, throwing dirty
water on other countries under the pretext of ‘cleanliness’, and conducting global
hunts on leading companies of other countries under the pretext of security.
This is naked bullying and should be opposed and rejected.”
China
tightly controls and censors its own cyberspace through the popularly dubbed
Great Firewall, which has for years restricted access to firms such as U.S.
majors Twitter Inc TWTR.N, Facebook Inc FB.O and Google owner Alphabet Inc
GOOGL.O.
The
administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has taken aim at Chinese giants
such as Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, Tencent Holdings Ltd 0700.HK and TikTok
owner ByteDance, citing concerns over national security and the collection of
personal data, which the companies have rejected.
It
has blocked U.S. exports to Huawei and plans to ban TikTok in the United States
this month unless ByteDance sells TikTok’s U.S. operations.
