A research paper published recently claims that Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei’s personnel have links with Chinese intelligence thereby compromising user privacy as well as national security of other countries.

Christopher Balding of the Fulbright University used a unique dataset of CVs and analysed the relationship between key Huawei personnel and the Chinese state security services. Based on his analysis, Balding says that there is “strong evidence” that Huawei personnel act at the direction of Chinese state intelligence, and that there exists a deep and lasting relationship between Huawei, its employees, and the Chinese state.

The findings support the already existing suspicion of countries world-wide, especially United States and countries in Western Europe that China uses Huawei as a surveillance resource.

Huawei has also been accused of various instances of intellectual property theft by companies such as Nortel, Cisco Systems, and T-Mobile US.

The Chinese multinational has vehemently denied the allegations that its products containing backdoors for Chinese government espionage. It recently announced a proposal for ‘no back-door pact’ in India under which it should be allowed to participate in the upcoming 5G roll-out in return of promise of no back-door. In its absence, the equipment supplier would not be able to access the customer’s network without consent.