Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters Thursday on his trip to Europe that the Communist regime in China is the “central threat of our times.

“While we still have to be enormously vigilant about terror … the Chinese Communist Party presents the central threat of our times,” Pompeo said on Thursday.

Pompeo is on a four-nation tour to the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.

In an interview with LBC Radio in the U.K. on Thursday, Pompeo was asked about the British government giving China’s Huawei a small role in building its 5G network.

Pompeo said when asked about the arrangement:

Look, we’ve said we were disappointed. We view the intrusion of the Chinese Communist Party into information technology systems as a very grave risk — a national security risk as well as a core privacy risk. If your health records are on a system that belongs and is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, that’s not something you’d probably choose in the first instance. And so we are looking forward to working with our United Kingdom partners on the security elements of this and then working alongside them to develop what we think about this trusted network.

“It’s not about Huawei,” Pompeo said. “It’s about ensuring that the information we put our citizens’ data on is secure and safe.”

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