Se lo chiede il giornalista americano John Reed in questo articolo pubblicato su Foreign Policy:

From Cairo to Johannesburg, the Chinese telecom has offices in 18 countries and has invested billions of dollars in building African communications networks since the late 1990s.[…]
“There’s a great deal of concern about Huawei acting to advance the interests of the Chinese government in a strategic sense, which includes not only traditional espionage but as a vehicle for economic espionage,” former Department of Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff told FP. “If you build the network on which all the data flows, you’re in a perfect position to populate it with backdoors or vulnerabilities that only you know about, you’re upgrading it, each time you upgrade the network or service it, that’s an opportunity” to install spyware. […]

“Across Africa — but especially in demographically large or resource-rich nations — Huawei is offering exceptionally competitive prices, generous financing, and fully managed systems to governments that otherwise have grave difficulty expanding into broadband (and the internet in general),” Chris Demchak, co-director of the Center for Cyber Conflict Studies at the U.S. Naval War College, told Foreign Policy in an email. […]
“Generally, most of the employees operating these systems are Chinese and the arrangements usually include delegating maintenance and decisions about future updates to Huawei as well, thus ensuring the Chinese firm’s control of the basic technological architecture’s foundation, evolution, and operations,” Demchak noted. […]
“Managing a nation’s backbone telecommunications system, especially if it is seen to be the basis for future economic development, is an exceptionally powerful position economically, politically, and technologically for any firm in a country, let alone a foreign firm,” Demchak said. “With that kind of monopoly (or near enough to same), it is much easier to quietly move massive streams of data, malware, and sophisticated penetration campaigns around through complex cyber systems without oversight.” […]

What’s potentially more disturbing about Huawei’s involvement in African telecommunications is that it could provide the Chinese government with direct access to those networks.
“Would Huawei, in constructing a lawful intercept capability for a sub-Saharan nation, build into the system, their own access to the lawful intercept capability thereby giving them tremendous insight into what that state thinks or does about its security?” asked Hayden rhetorically. “Those are dangers.”
“Even if there aren’t any backdoors, which is a large hypothesis, just the Chinese state having access to the architecture of your system is a tremendous advantage for the Chinese should they want to engage in any electronic surveillance, any electronic eavesdropping,” Hayden added. […]
In addition to giving Huawei — and potentially the Chinese government — vital intelligence on African nations, Demchak worries that access to Africa’s telecommunications infrastructure could make it even easier for Chinese hackers to disguise their attacks by rerouting them through the continent. Basically, the continent could serve as a giant laundromat for Chinese cyber-aggression.
“One could imagine a situation where the Chinese management of Africa’s backbone in effect turns much of the continent into a ‘bullet-proof host’,” said Demchak describing a term for Web hosting services that permit illegal activities.
“In that case, laundering of bad cyber behaviors through these backbones could easily be largely untouchable and uncontrollable externally by other nations,” added Demchak. If she’s right, Huawei’s investments in Africa might not just be problematic for the people who live on the continent. They could be an issue for all of us.