China’s State-Owned Telecom Firms Developing $500m Fiber-Optic Cable Network to Rival US-Backed Project

China’s three main telecom carriers, China Telecom, China Mobile, and China United Network Communications Group, are reportedly in the process of mapping one of the world’s most advanced and far-reaching subsea cable networks.

The network, called EMA (Europe-Middle East-Asia), is expected to link Hong Kong to China’s island province of Hainan before snaking its way to Singapore, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and France.

The proposed cable, costing approximately $500 million to complete, will be manufactured and laid by China’s HMN Technologies, a fast-growing cable firm whose predecessor company was majority-owned by Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies.

The Chinese state is expected to provide subsidies to HMN Tech for the development of the cable.

Undersea cables carry more than 95% of all international internet traffic, and these high-speed conduits for decades have been owned by groups of telecom and tech companies that pool their resources to build these vast networks so that data can move seamlessly around the world.

China’s plan to develop a rival undersea fiber-optic internet cable network, coming in the wake of the US government’s concern about Beijing eavesdropping on internet data and the blocking of licenses for planned private subsea cables that would have connected the US with the Chinese territory of Hong Kong, including projects led by Google, Meta Platforms, and Amazon, has raised questions about the future of the internet.

While China’s three state-owned telecom firms are expected to own more than half of the new network, they are also striking deals with foreign partners.

The firms this year signed separate memoranda of understanding with four telecoms: France’s Orange, Pakistan Telecommunication Company, Telecom Egypt, and Zain Saudi Arabia, a unit of the Kuwaiti firm Mobile Telecommunications Company.

The Chinese companies have also held talks with Singapore Telecommunications, and other countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East are being approached to join the consortium as well.

The China-led EMA project is intended to directly rival another cable currently being constructed by US firm SubCom called SeaMeWe-6. The consortium on the SeaMeWe-6 cable, which initially had included China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom and telecom carriers from several other nations, initially picked HMN Tech to build that cable. But a successful US government pressure campaign flipped the contract to SubCom last year. The US blitz included giving millions of dollars in training grants to foreign telecom firms in return for them choosing SubCom over HMN Tech.