The House Select Committee on China published a report on Tuesday that warned the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has “infiltrated and weaponized” America’s communications networks, despite federal action intended to hold Beijing’s influence at bay.
“Chinese state-owned carriers remained deeply embedded in the U.S. internet ecosystem long after federal regulators had already found them vulnerable to CCP exploitation, influence, and control,” the committee said.
The report, entitled Stranger Pings: Chinese Telecom Companies Infiltrate U.S. Infrastructure in a clever nod to the popular Netflix show Stranger Things, noted that firms like China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom have retained “extensive unregulated footprints in the United States,” even after their telecom licenses were denied or revoked.
The report further demonstrated that these companies are controlled by the Chinese state, even though they have public shareholders, and their U.S. subsidiaries are not truly independent from their mother companies in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), despite claims to the contrary.
China Unicom Ltd., for example, is a publicly listed company headquartered in Hong Kong – but its ultimate owner is China United Network Communication Group Co. Ltd., a state-owned enterprise.
The report pointed out that PRC national security laws require all companies to hand over confidential user data to Chinese military intelligence upon request, and this obligation “follows the network infrastructure globally.”
The report said:
Because the U.S. subsidiaries rely on parent-controlled routing and systems, any query, prompt, or output traveling over infrastructure managed by these entities – whether transmitted by a student, a commercial developer, or a corporate laboratory – remains potentially visible to Chinese intelligence services. In short, the physical wires and digital pathways operating in the United States function as legal extensions of the PRC security state.
China-linked companies often plead ignorance when asked about the beneficiaries of their services. The House Select Committee on China learned at its hearings that parent companies based in the PRC could instruct their U.S. subsidiaries to “provision servers and connectivity for unidentified parties without disclosing who the ultimate beneficiaries are.” Staffers at the U.S.-based subsidiaries make a point of not asking about their identities.
“Hypothetically, a PRC intelligence agency itself could contract for services in the U.S. with the parent company, and the U.S. subsidiary would remain ignorant of this reality. This is an unacceptable blind spot,” the committee said.
CCP influence over these companies is not always subtle. China Unicom’s American subsidiary, CUA, responded to a congressional subpoena by disclosing that seven of the eight members of its Board of Directors were members of the Chinese Communist Party, as were two of its three senior management team members.
The report also pointed out that U.S. subsidiaries of Chinese telecom companies are frequently ordered to delay network changes or maintenance on Chinese holidays, which clearly demonstrates the parent companies have direct operational control over American operations.
The House report highlighted a weakness in the U.S. response to Chinese Internet security threats: when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) revoked licenses for the Chinese firms, it merely prevented them from building new capacity and making new sales, without rolling up any of the online architecture the companies had already established.
“Consequently, the FCC’s admirable and historic enforcement actions addressed only a fraction of the national security threat,” the House report lamented. “By rebuilding their U.S. businesses around network services outside the core Section 214 licensing framework, they preserved their operational footing at critical nodes of U.S. Internet infrastructure.”
This infrastructure gives CCP-controlled entities the ability to “actively manipulate how American traffic moves across the Internet.”
This is done by manipulating the “trust” inherent in America’s complex architecture of servers and gateways. The Stranger Pings report compared it to “placing a fake detour sign on a highway,” as malicious networks falsely claim to provide faster and more direct access to high-demand online resources.
“For over fifteen years, China Telecom and other state-owned carriers have consistently surfaced in technical studies, public reporting, and U.S. Government proceedings regarding large-scale internet routing incidents,” the report revealed. “These episodes have repeatedly misrouted U.S. government, private-sector, and domestic traffic across PRC-controlled networks.”
The threat posed by network traffic hijacking remains active to this day, as investigations by the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) find companies based in the PRC and Hong Kong continue to divert American network traffic onto routing paths controlled by Beijing, and do so with a frequency far beyond what could be explained by random chance or algorithm anomalies.
The threat from Chinese penetration of the American Internet is not just theoretical. Stranger Pings included case studies of malevolent botnets lurking in servers and routers provided by Chinese firms, including the most notorious cybercrimes of the 2020s: the “Three Typhoon” espionage ring that was exposed in 2024.
“This operation proved that Beijing’s hackers no longer rely on malware alone,” the report said of the massive “Salt Typhoon” attack. “Instead, they weaponize the fundamental architecture of carrier networks – routing, reachability, and trusted pathways – to maintain deep, persistent access and evade detection.”
The House Select Committee on China strongly advised Congress to “codify the FCC’s authority to deny blanket authorizations and restrict domestic interconnection,” so dangerous networks could be eliminated instead of being prevented from expanding further, and to give U.S. government agencies more power to intervene in “private commercial arrangements involving foreign-controlled infrastructure.”
This level of oversight is crucial because the “trust” aspect of Internet routing is one of the reasons it works with such astounding speed and efficiency. If networks begin double- and triple-checking the claims of speed and access made by routers and carriers, the performance of the Internet would lurch a decade in the wrong direction. Gatekeeping the U.S. Internet – much the way China zealously patrols the frontiers of its own Internet – is the only solution, it proposes.
“U.S.-based subsidiaries of Chinese telecommunications companies are beholden to the CCP, and they are a threat to all of us,” committee chair Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI) said. “They make American customers promise to censor information according to the CCP’s laws, and they poison the domestic cyber infrastructure we rely on.”
“The CCP does not allow U.S. telecom companies into China,” he noted. “We must cut these subsidiaries out of our domestic infrastructure to protect the American people.”
“Particularly in light of the CCP’s Typhoon campaigns, Congress should continue to address risks to Americans’ data and ensure that the agencies responsible for securing our communications networks have the resources they need to respond to potential threats,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), the ranking Democrat on the committee, said.
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