Huawei Fights Exclusion from Romania’s 5G Race

Signed by users bearing mostly Romanian but also Chinese names, they all expressed the same critical view about the legislation in question: that it would be very unwise to exclude Huawei from the race and that Romania's interests would be seriously harmed if this happened.

Although citizens had 13 days to make comments on the law, all of these messages were registered over 72 consecutive hours. Before that time, or after it, no such comment was uploaded on the websites. 

Most of the messages shared another dubious trait: they were either written in broken English or equally deficient Romanian, which suggested they had been Google translated, produced by some sort of automatic mechanism or filed by people with only a superficial knowledge of either language.

The evidence of what looks like a travesty of a public participation process can still be found at the website of the Ministry of Transport and Communications. 

The flood of near-identical messages gives some idea of how aggressively Huawei is fighting its ban in Romania, which responds to national security concerns first raised by the US, which has prevented the use of Huawei technology in sensitive telecommunications at home and wants its allies to follow suit.

The US considers the company "an arm of the Chinese Communist Party's surveillance state" and the US Department of Justice has indicted Huawei "for stealing US technology, conspiracy wire fraud, bank fraud, [and] racketeering", among other charges.

In Romania, both the centre-right President, Klaud Iohannis, and his allied government have repeatedly voiced full alignment with the US in this matter. In July 2019, Romania became the first country in the world to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with the US,...

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