Chinese foreign ministry says biggest cybersecurity threat posed by US

Amid strained ties between Washington and Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin on Monday said that the United States is "the top threat to global cybersecurity."

"As facts have proven time and again, it is the US that has been forcing companies to install backdoors and obtaining user data in violation of relevant rules. The US itself is the top threat to global cybersecurity," Wenbin said during a press briefing.

Wenbin stated that the US has long been taking advantage of its advanced tech capacity to run invasive surveillance on people at home and abroad, steal various types of data and violate all kinds of privacy.

"The Patriot Act adopted after 9/11 requires cyber companies to offer regular updates on user information. This move has drawn much attention from around the world. France's CNIL decided in December last year that the French websites of Google and Amazon breached relevant French law by placing cookies on the computers of users without obtaining prior consent and without providing adequate information. Earlier, Ireland asked Facebook to suspend the transmission of EU user data to the US," he further said.

"We call on the international community to jointly expose and reject US practices that endanger global cybersecurity and undermine global rules," he added.

The ties between Washington and Beijing had deteriorated after the US has taken sharply opposing positions against China in various issues including the trace of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the human rights exploitations of Uyghur Muslims in China's Xinjiang province.