After new Edward Snowden documents revealed NSA operations against Huawei, the tech company and China want answers.
Since at least 2007, the NSA has been conducting a sophisticated operation against Huawei, hacking into its servers, stealing its source code, and monitoring its employees' emails, as first reported by The New York Times on Saturday.
The Chinese government is "gravely concerned" about the report, and asked the United States to cease its spying operations, according to news reports.
"China has lodged complaints to the United States about this many times. We urge the U.S. side to make a clear explanation and stop this kind of acts," Hong Lei, China's Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Monday, according to The Washington Post.
"We always believe that Internet communication technology should be employed for a country’s social-economic development, rather than Internet espionage and monitoring," Lei said, according to The New York Times. "China has also consistently advocated that the international community should work together to draw up relevant regulations to build a peaceful, secure, open and cooperative cyberspace."
Lei's words might be seen as hypocritical, considering China runs one of the most sophisticated Internet censorship systems in the world, and Chinese hackers have famously engaged in all kinds of cyberattacks. Most notably, hackers allegedly linked to the Chinese government hacked the New York Times, stole U.S. weapons secrets and breached Google's servers, among other exploits.
Huawei denounced NSA has been breaking into its servers as part of an operation codenamed "Shotgiant."
"If the actions in the report are true, Huawei condemns such activities that invaded and infiltrated into our internal corporate network and monitored our communications," Huawei's global cyber security officer, John Suffolk, told Reuters on Sunday. "Corporate networks are under constant probe and attack from different sources - such is the status quo in today's digital age."
The latest Snowden revelations came just a few days ahead of a meeting between President Barack Obama and China's President Xi Jinping, which was planned for Monday afternoon.