Beijing - China has denounced US charges against five of its army officers accused of economic cyber-espionage. Beijing says the US is also guilty of spying on other countries, including China, and accuses the US of hypocrisy and "double standards". China has summoned the US ambassador in Beijing over the incident. It says relations will be damaged. US prosecutors say the officers stole trade secrets and internal documents from five companies and a labour union.
China's defence ministry put out a strongly-worded statement on its website on Tuesday saying that China's government and its military "had never engaged in any cyber espionage activities". It also took aim at the US, saying: "For a long time, the US has possessed the technology and essential infrastructure needed to conduct large-scale systematic cyber thefts and surveillance on foreign government leaders, businesses and individuals. This is a fact which the whole world knows.
"The US' deceitful nature and its practice of double standards when it comes to cyber security have long been exposed, from the Wikileaks incident to the Edward Snowden affair." China always insists it is a victim of hacking, not a perpetrator. And when US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden appeared in Hong Kong a year ago with evidence of US hacking into Chinese networks, Beijing felt vindicated.
The US acknowledges that it conducts espionage but says unlike China it does not spy on foreign companies and pass what it finds to its own companies. Beijing typically shrugs this off as a smear motivated by those who find its growing technological might hard to bear. But to see five named officers of the People's Liberation Army indicted by a US grand jury is not something that can be brushed aside so easily.
China has already announced the suspension of co-operation with the US on an internet working group. And once it has had time to digest this loss of face, it is likely to consider more serious retaliation. The defence ministry added that China's military had been the target of many online attacks, and "a fair number" of those had been launched from American IP addresses.
It said the arrest of the five Chinese army officers had "severely damaged mutual trust". A Xinhua report on Tuesday stated that between March and May this year, a total of 1.18 million computers in China were directly controlled by 2,077 machines in the United States via Trojan horse or zombie malware.
Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Zheng Zeguang lodged a "solemn representation" with US ambassador Max Baucus on Monday night, Xinhua reported.(FA)
