China rightly pointed out that this was not so much a spying accusation as a desperate attempt to protect American companies from cheaper Chinese competition. Now it seems that China's Ministry of Public Security is planning a tit for tat “investigation” against top US companies over “security issues.”
This means IBM, Oracle and EMC could suffer see themselves banned from selling in China. The company names are on the Chinese list because of revelations by former US spy agency contractor Edward Snowden that they were involved in a National Security Agency hack into critical network infrastructure at universities in China and in Hong Kong.
Documents leaked by Snowden revealed that the NSA has had access to vast amounts of Internet data such as emails, chat rooms and video from large companies, including Facebook and Google, under a government program known as Prism.
"At present, thanks to their technological superiority, many of our core information technology systems are basically dominated by foreign hardware and software firms, but the Prism scandal implies security problems," the newspaper quoted an anonymous source as saying.