The US government, together with its allies, has released a joint statement on endorsing 6G principles under the name of national security, a move that Chinese experts said reflects the White House's latest attempts to compete with China in the telecommunication sector.

Gaining an edge in 6G technology is based on the positive development of 5G, an area where the US has fallen behind amid its relentless attempts to block Chinese technological gains. Such an approach, driven by a politically motivated zero-sum game mentality, may not yield substantive results, experts said.

Experts urged the US to drop the "small yard and high fence" mentality and shift toward cooperation rather than competition for win-win outcomes.

The US, together with nine allies including Australia, Canada, Japan and the UK, released on Monday a joint statement to endorse principles for 6G under the name of national security.

The move aims to "advance research and development and the standardization of 6G networks." Trusted technology that is protective of national security is the highlight of the principle.

Although there is no mention of China, it's rather obvious that the move has a target, raising concerns of another round of US-led protectionism in the world telecommunication sector, experts said.

Some foreign media outlets characterized the move as another stage of the US tech race with China.

Before the principles were unveiled, hyping the tense atmosphere, the US publication The Hill, which covers Congress, used a sensational headline in an article on February 21, claiming that "If China dominates 5G and 6G, no defense system can protect America."

The US move was within expectations as it is desperate to make up for what it lost in the 5G era, but by drawing a "little circle" may not help the US catch up in the field, Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Beijing-based Information Consumption Alliance, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

6G technology does not come from the sky but is an expansion of 5G development. China has been successful not only in technology and standards but also applications with scenarios ranging from smart manufacturing to ports and mining, providing a good foundation for its 6G development, Xiang said.

China has built the world's largest optical fiber and mobile broadband networks, and more than 80 percent of administrative villages across the country have 5G access, data released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology shows.

On this basis, Chinese companies are making progress on 5G-A, or 5.5G, which represents a transitional phase between 5G and 6G, with a series of products on show at the ongoing Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

"In order to race with China, the US should at least make some progress on 5G before reaching for 6G," the expert said.

The US announcement of its 6G principles did not shatter the Chinese telecommunication industry - just the reverse. Right after the principles were unveiled, the shares of many Chinese corresponding companies, including ZTE, closed higher by the daily limit of 10 percent on Tuesday. ZTE's transaction volume was 7.889 billion yuan, a new high for the past seven months.

Experts said that China's approach to telecommunication technology is notably open and encourages international collaboration in the realm of 6G. This stands in stark contrast to the imposition of tech restrictions by the US, which disrupts global supply chains.

In the development of 6G, international cooperation needs to be strengthened to allow more international companies to form an understanding and recognize China's standards in the area. In this case, if the US wants to isolate China's standards, it will be isolating itself, Fu Liang, a Beijing-based tech analyst, told the Global Times in a previous interview.

"If the US refuses to learn from China and open up to cooperation with China, including using more equipment from China, it will be a severe test for the development of 6G in the US, as it has already proved in its confrontation with 5G with China," Ma Jihua, a veteran telecom observer, told the Global Times, calling for more cooperation instead of confrontation or competition.

China's home-made C919 aircraft arrived back in Shanghai on Monday, after making its debut at the Singapore Airshow.

The plane arrived in Singapore on February 17 together with another C919 and three ARJ21 aircraft.

China Eastern Airlines said the C919 was on static display for the public during the air show.

During the six-day show, the booth welcomed more than 20 groups of visitors per day, said Hu Hong, cabin manager of China Eastern Airlines' cabin department. She said that the visitors included heads and senior professionals from aircraft manufacturers, aviation service providers, and upstream and downstream enterprises in the aviation industry chain.

They were very interested in asking about every detail in the cabin, especially the C919's cabin layout, number of passengers, commercial routes, operating data and routes to be opened in the future, Hu said.

China's Tibet Airlines and Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China signed a deal at the airshow for 50 aircraft suitable for high-altitude plateaus - 40 C919 and 10 ARJ21 jets.

A sea-rail intermodal train loaded with 100 TEUs of thermos cups, folding chairs and other goods departs from a train station in Jinhua City, East China's Zhejiang Province, and heads for Ningbo Zhoushan Port, to ship overseas on February 23, 2024. It is the station's first freight train trip after resumption of work following the Spring Festival. Photo: VCG

As the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reported last week the Chinese economy expanded by 5.2 percent in 2023 from the previous year, several Western media outlets immediately cast doubt over the reading, casting it in a negative light and seized the opportunity to wage a smear campaign on China's economic growth.

The way some leading Western newspapers describe China's 2023 GDP data carries a pessimistic connotation, which Chinese analysts said is in the tradition of their long-standing biased reporting on China, which serves their ulterior and sinister motives.

Upon a closer inspection, people will find out that such a narrative tends to be diminishing China's hard-won economic achievement in its successful emergence from the impact of COVID-19 pandemic, by overstating the troubles China's economy faces.

These are new rounds of so-called cognitive warfare against China, an important means for Western anti-China forces to attack and discredit the country, Chinese analysts pointed out.

After the NBS's 2023 GDP and other data were published, the Wall Street Journal, in a report entitled "China's Economy Limps Into 2024," alleged that China's growth will be "subpar until property market and income growth find a firmer footing."

The New York Times, meanwhile, published an essay entitled "China's Economy Is in Serious Trouble," in which the author, noted American economist Paul Krugman described that "the US economy vastly outperformed expectations in 2023," but "the story has been very different" in China.

Misinformation at work

While China's economy faces drag from certain sectors, such as a correction in the property sector, the wording and connotation carried in the Western media reports seem to be misinformation upon closer examination, analysts said.

China's 5.2-percent growth in 2023 far exceeded an estimated global average of 3-percent growth and China will likely continue to be the largest growth engine for the global economy, with a contribution of more than 30 percent to the world economy, Kang Yi, head of NBS, told a State Council Information Office press conference on January 17.

As a matter of fact, China's GDP growth is clearly one of the highest growth rates reported across the world's major economies. Compared to a mere 3.0-percent rise in 2022, the 5.2-percent growth in 2023 is both substantial and impressive, meeting Chinese government's preset target and in line with the projections by a wide poll of economists.

Moreover, according to estimates by some analysts, China is among the fastest growing major economies in the world, measured in the four years after the pandemic, growing at more than double the rate of the US and several times faster than the eurozone.

Not only China maintained a sound economic growth in 2023, the country is also poised to achieve good growth rates in 2024 and beyond.

China's economic growth is expected to reach around 5 percent in 2024, Li Daokui, director of Tsinghua University's Academic Center for Chinese Economic Practice and Thinking, told the Global Times on January 20.

Analysts expected stable economic growth in China in 2024, to be mainly fueled by supportive macro policies, and accelerated consumption and investment.

China's economy is expected to run smoothly in 2024, with annual GDP growth of about 5.3 percent, the Center for Forecasting Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the government think tank, said in a forecast report published on January 9.

Ulterior purposes

Analysts said the twisted narratives adopted by the Western media showed their renewed efforts to interplay with positions held by the US politicians on the so-called "China collapse" theory, to scare investors away from China in the sphere of increasingly important financial competition in which the US deem China as a threat to its supremacy and hegemony.

Ma Jihua, a veteran telecom observer, told the Global Times on Wednesday that as the US government's endeavor to suppress China's technology development has to a large extent failed, demonstrated by China's steady expansion in mature semiconductor chips.

And, increasingly, the focus of competition is being shifted to the financial front, in which media misinformation plays a key role.

"Since last year, the US stock market has been on an upward trend, regardless of the economic woes the US economy had. It seems neither weak economic data nor a pending fiscal crisis that festers the economy can prevent the US stock market from going higher and higher," Ma said.

As the US stock market became "too big to fail," Western politicians, financial institutions and media are motivated to spin narratives that can shepherd capital away from China and into the US, and this tactic will not only serve to buttress the precarious performance of the US stock market, but hurt that of China's, observers noted.

Some Western media pundits also weighed in, delving into narratives to prove that China's economy is in dire straits, in the hopes to frighten away China's business partners and international investors interested in buying Chinese yuan-denominated assets and diversifying their investment portfolios to reduce their holdings of US dollar assets.

Deeply rooted in their zero-sum mentality, misinformation has become a tool in the overall US strategy to suppress China's development, Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

"Some Western media outlets have used this occasion to once again distort the development of the Chinese economy in both quantity and quality terms," Li Haidong said. "They may hope their way of story-telling could sow discontent and instability among Chinese over the country's economic future."

"In finance, confidence is paramount. Whoever commands confidence and market expectation command resources. Economies that face destabilization will see resources flee away," Li Haidong said, noting that the reporting of China's 2023 GDP once again showed that Western media has been instrumental in the West's China-smearing campaign that is a far shot from fact.