China’s government on Thursday rebuked the US for spying on Huawei Technologies, the Shenzhen-based telecommunications giant, saying that reports of cyber espionage by the National Security Agency “l(fā)ay bare the United States’s hypocrisy and despotic rule”.

Geng Yansheng, defence ministry spokesman, told a briefing for journalists that China planned to take urgent steps to increase its cyber security to prevent such hacking attacks taking place. Using unusually hostile and sarcastic language, Mr Geng said: “For a while now, some Americans have jabbered on and on, condemning Chinese hacking attacks. But the truth is that this is without any basis in fact, it is simply a thief crying: ‘Stop, thief!’”

The New York Times newspaper and Der Spiegel, the German magazine, recently published articles based on classified documents handed over by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, which alleged the NSA had snooped on Huawei’s servers in an attempt to discover weak points that could be exploited for hacking attacks on the company’s clients. “Many of our targets communicate over Huawei-produced products,” said one of the documents published by the New York Times.