The Financial Times' report is a malicious denigration of the Chinese government and slander on the Chinese students by the British media, said the Chinese Embassy in the UK on Saturday, in response to a report accusing a Chinese hacking group of luring university graduates into digital espionage with the support of the government.

On June 30, the Financial Times published an article entitled "China lures graduate jobseekers into digital espionage," alleging that "Chinese university students have been lured to work at a secretive technology company that masked the true nature of their jobs: researching western targets and spying and translating hacked documents as part of Beijing's industrial-scale intelligence regime."

A spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in the UK said that it is sheer nonsense and that the report is a blatant violation of the professional norms of fairness, impartiality, and objectivity of journalism.

Some forces in the West, motivated by ideological bias and narrow political self-interest, keep making groundless accusations and smear attacks against other countries. "It is rather unexpected that Financial Times should become a mouthpiece for the US and the UK intelligence agencies by following the hype and making false accusations, which is to the disappointment and contempt of its readers," the spokesperson said.

For a long time, the US, while using its technological advantages for massive and indiscriminate eavesdropping on the world, has kept placing smear attacks and unjustified suppression against other countries under the pretext of maintaining national security.

It is purely playing the trick of a thief crying stop thief, the spokesperson noted. The Financial Times itself reported on October 25, 2021 that UK's three spy agencies have contracted Amazon to host top-secret material in a deal aimed at boosting the use of data analytics and artificial intelligence for espionage and enabling spies to share and analyze more easily a huge amount of data from field locations overseas.

The spokesperson pointed out that China is a staunch defender of cyber security and also a main victim of cyber theft and attacks. In 2020, China launched the Global Initiative on Data Security, which calls for all state parties to stand against the use and abuse of ICT for the destruction of critical infrastructure or theft of important data of other States.

The spokesperson urged the Financial Times to take an objective, rational and responsible attitude, to abide by professional ethics and stop making up and spreading anti-China rumors.

Global Times