HONG KONG (Reuters) - ZTE Corp said on Monday that the scope of a U.S. committee probe into Chinese telecom equipment makers should be expanded to protect U.S. national security and that it is not directed or controlled by the Chinese government.

"ZTE should not be a focus of this investigation to the exclusion of the much larger Western vendors," ZTE, China's second largest telecom equipment maker, said in a letter addressed to the U.S. committee.

China's top telecommunications gear makers should be kept from the U.S. market because they cannot be trusted to dodge Chinese state influence and thus pose a security threat, the U.S. House of Representatives' Intelligence Committee leaders said in a draft of a report to be released Monday.

(Reporting by Lee Chyen Yee; Editing by Anne Marie Roantree)