GCHQ director calls for caution regarding China's tech threat

The UK's cyber-security agency’s director Jeremy Fleming warned that Britain must understand the potential "opportunities and threats" of using Chinese technology and called for better cyber-security practices in the telecoms industry.

GCHQ's director added that working with Chinese tech that it’s a “hugely complex strategic challenge.”

Currently, the UK is facing pressure from the US to ban Chinese company Huawei from contributing to the new 5G networks which are due to be rolled-out in the back half of 2019, over concerns that it might misuse its access in order to conduct surveillance for the government in Beijing.

At the end of 2018, MI6 chief, Alex Younger, had also weighed in, telling an audience: "We need to decide the extent to which we are going to be comfortable with Chinese ownership of these technologies and these platforms in an environment where some of our allies have taken a quite definite position."

And yet the National Cyber Security Centre, part of the GCHQ said last week that any risks the company posed to the UK were manageable although it did raise concerns around poor cyber-security practices.

Most of the UK's mobile companies - Vodafone, EE and Three - have been working with Huawei on 5G, but they are awaiting the results of a government review, due in two or three months' time, to know if they can continue.

BT however did confirm in 2018 that it was taking Huawei equipment out of the EE core network.

In remarks prepared for an event in Singapore, Mr Fleming said the government wanted to make sure there was a balance between the supply chain and diversity in the telecommunications equipment suppliers

"We have to understand the opportunities and threats from China's technological offer - understand the global nature of supply chains and service provision, irrespective of the flag of the supplier," he said.

"Take a clear view on the implications of China's technological acquisition strategy in the West, and help our governments decide which parts of this expansion can be embraced, which need risk management, and which will always need a sovereign, or allied, solution."