Amid growing political pressure in the West to shut out Chinese groups from telecoms infrastructure, the former head of the UK's GCHQ intelligence arm uses an FT guest column today to appeal for an end to “hysteria” over Chinese tech.

The GCHQ-vetted National Cyber Security Centre has been studying Huawei's presence in the UK's telecoms networks for several years, giving it a unique insight among Western security agencies into the company, writes Robert Hannigan, GCHQ's director from 2014 to 2017. It has “never found evidence of malicious Chinese state cyber activity through Huawei”.

Western governments have reason to be wary of Chinese cyber espionage, he adds, with NCSC reports pointing to “attacks on IT-managed service providers around the world”. But such attacks did not need to rely on the presence of a Chinese infrastructure company, meaning that blanket bans on such groups will not help.