Illustration: Tang Tengfei/GT

The current US government, clueless on containing a plethora of daunting challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic and race-related violence at home, is ramping up its efforts to assault progressive forces in the world - be it green production to reduce global warming headed by the European Union, or next-generation ultrafast wireless broadband technology led by China's Huawei Technologies. 

On Thursday, Mike Pompeo, former director of the US' top intelligence body, the CIA, since picked by Donald Trump to be his secretary of state, was again slinging mud at Huawei with the invention of a new descriptor "clean telcos" - lobbying America's global allies to dissuade and block their telecommunications operators from importing and using Huawei's genuinely superior 5G networks. 

"The tide is turning toward trusted 5G vendors and away from Huawei, and the world's leading telecom companies, Telefonica, Orange, Jio, Telstra and many more, are becoming Clean Telcos," Pompeo tweeted. 

Describing Huawei as a tool of China's "communist state" and the company's 5G technology implicitly "unclean", Pompeo and his cohorts in the Trump administration are re-igniting the old debate about telecom national security, in the US' consistent and relentless attempt to harass, contain and stifle a top Chinese technology aspirant. 

With all company shares owned by more than 97,000 of its total 200,000 employees, Huawei is de facto a privately-run enterprise - which has been investing 10-15 percent of its annual revenues in research and development. Increasingly, it has become a global high-tech conglomerate, focusing on exploring the most advanced mobile technologies to benefit humankind.

Huawei's innovative 4G and 5G wireless networks have been broadly rolled out across China and many other nations, contributing significantly to fast and extensive internet access in those countries and laying the foundation for a spate of revolutionary business models - be it e-commerce, commodity/service pooling, car-hailing, seamless person-to-person interactions and the almighty social media. 

Huawei's 5G solution is incredibly advanced, differing from the current state of its market competitors like Nokia and Ericsson. 

Chinese experts say after large-scale 5G deployment reaches its climax at the end of 2024 - coupled with China's other innovations in AI, robotics and quantum computing - there will be an explosion of prodigious innovations and business models that will catapult our daily lives to new and amazing heights. 

As tools for innovation and prosperity, Huawei's 5G should have been deployed in as many countries on our planet as possible to bring about efficiency, convenience and wealth to the people of those nations. However, the US government just cannot bear to see China's technological success, and this group of ill-willed politicians like Pompeo have become reckless, desperate to stop the progress of Chinese tech companies, placing Huawei in the crosshair. 

Like what has been done in the past four years to scrap the Paris climate change agreement, the anti-intermediate missile pact, the six-partite agreement on settling Iran's nuclear program, and many other global agreements, the politicians in Washington are becoming a reactionary clique, bound to reverse the clock and make our world a more chaotic and dangerous one. 

The US government labels Huawei as a national security threat and wants to kill the Chinese technology firm with all means at its disposal. This is not a secret to the world. 

Nevertheless, through the years Washington has found no evidence of the alleged "back doors" to support its demonization of Huawei. Ironically, the US' intelligence agencies have been ferreted out as eavesdropping leaders of major European powers, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel. 

What Pompeo and his peers in Washington dream of is strangling Huawei to death. They are bullying a technology company, in the first instance by cutting off all component supply, and then moving to tighten their rope by coercing their allies not to use Huawei's equipment.

But many sane governments around the world are unlikely to heed Washington's evil urge, and they will continue to import Huawei's advanced technology and cooperate with China, because technology progress is unstoppable. 

Let's consider a couple of comparisons. Now, the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai runs 5 times faster than the Amtrak carriage from Chicago to New York. Chinese people have already entered paperless electronic payment, while many Americans still write paychecks at the tolls. It's actually this country which is leading the latest wave in tech innovation.

The author is an editor with the Global Times. bizopinion@globaltimes.com.cn