A PAPER published by China’s biggest telecom equipment maker said the company’s path into the United States had been blocked by unsubstantiated “allegations based on allegations” that threatened to harm ties between the world’s two biggest economies.

The complaint published by Shenzhen-based Huawei Technologies Co. was spelled out on the eve of the company’s scheduled testimony Friday at a rare public hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Intelligence Committee.

The committee is completing a nearly year-long investigation of security threats allegedly posed by equipment sold by Huawei, as well as ZTE Corp., a smaller cross-town rival also frustrated by challenges entering the U.S. market.

The concern is that their products may be booby-trapped and provide the Chinese “an opportunity for greater foreign espionage, threaten our critical infrastructure, or increase the opportunities for Chinese economic espionage,” the Republican-led House Intelligence panel said in a notice about the hearing.

Huawei, second only in telecom gear sales worldwide to Sweden’s Ericsson, pushed back with an 81-page paper titled “The Case for Huawei in America,” published on the Web site of its U.S. subsidiary Wednesday night.

“Much of the evidence fueling lawmakers’ concerns remains classified,” said the heavily footnoted paper by Dan Steinbock, described as an authority on trade and investment and U.S.-Chinese relations.

“However, when one set of allegations are substantiated with another set of allegations, the line between investigation and maltreatment grows thin,” the paper said, decrying “allegations based on allegations.”

Continued rebuffs of Huawei in the United States, the document added, “is giving rise to a de facto blueprint for mirror-like Chinese measures to protect perceived strategic industries on the mainland.”

Testifying for Huawei will be Charles Ding, a corporate senior vice president. For ZTE, Zhu Jinyun, senior vice president for North America and Europe.

The two are believed to be the first representatives of major Chinese corporations to testify before a U.S. congressional committee.

ZTE said it welcomes the hearing as an opportunity to respond to criticism that associates it directly with the Chinese Government and competitor companies. It also want to provide security assurances to enable its entry into the lucrative U.S. network infrastructure market.

“We respect the U.S. Government’s security concerns,” Zhu said. “We need to work together to find a solution for those concerns, and this should be our start.”

The U.S. congressional committee has requested exhaustive information from both Huawei and ZTE on their ownership structures and connections to the Chinese Government, saying it wants to establish if they can truly act as private companies. It has sought details of meetings over the past five years and credit received through State institutions.

Huawei and Bain Capital Partners were forced to give up their bid in 2008 for computer-equipment maker 3Com Corp. after the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency group led by the Treasury Department, raised objections.

Last year, Huawei dropped plans to buy certain assets from 3Leaf Systems, a computer services company, after more problems with the foreign investment panel. (SD-Agencies)