After reports out of Africa on how the Chinese government had been spying on the African Union’s headquarters based within Addis Abada had spread, China has responded by calling the report “preposterous” and “very difficult to understand” all while strongly dismissing the “absurd” report.
All of this was brought to surface before the 2018 AU Summit, a twice yearly meeting which was being held within the AU headquarters built by the Chinese as a “gift” to their “Friends of Africa” all the way back in 2012. The unseen “security threat” that had remained supposedly active between 2012 and 2017 despite the assumption that the lavish HQ would be monitored of utmost importance would cause the HQ’s servers between 12am and 2am send data to Shanghai servers, daily. The data supposedly compromised of “secrets” was being sent to offsite servers for the past 5 years and was discovered by a computer scientist after realizing a weirdly large amount of data transfer occurring in such an obscure time. It was only till the organization got its technical team together and fuond the connection to the foreign servers.
How do they claim it all happened? Well, back in 2012 when China “graciously offered” the stunning $200 million dollar brand new headquarters as a gift the report claims that a backdoor was purposely implemented by the Chinese who were fully equipping the computer systems based in the HQ. This allowing Chinese spies to have complete access to the AU HQ’s servers, thousands of kilometers away. “Le Monde Afrique” is the name of the French newspaper that led the “stunning investigation” in which revealed the “Chinese espionage efforts”. After the report broke loose, AU officials were quick to respond saying “Following this discovery, we have taken some steps to strengthen our cybersecurity” to the French newspaper.
Another AU official went on anonymously and continued to say that at least “The Chinese have nothing to listen to. They have never colonized us. They have supported the struggles of independence on the continent and help us economically today”. Going forward after discovering the exploit, AU officials moved on to scrap the old servers which were set up by the Chinese, and acquired their own. Despite China offering yet again to setup these new servers, the AU declined. The use of encryption within electronic communication and even the usage of foreign telephone lines were implemented for the AU’s added security.
China’s Kuang Weilin, Chinese ambassador spoke out to the AU and told other reporters that the claim in the French newspaper was “very difficult to understand” and “absurd”. After Mr. Weilin told reporters “I really question its intention” regarding the French newspapers’ report and going on to say that “I think it will undermine and send a very negative message to people. I think it is not good for the image of the newspaper itself” – he said that the headquarters served as a “monument” to China’s relationship with Africa, all while claiming it completely and entirely untrue. He finished by saying that “Certainly, it will create problems for China-Africa relations”.