House of Huawei. By Eva Dou. Portfolio; 448 pages; $34. Abacus; £25It is one of the world’s most controversial companies, supplying much of the developing world with vital telecoms kit. American officials swear it is a spying tool for China’s Communist Party. It has been accused of all manner of infractions, including intellectual-property theft, receiving lavish state subsidies that allow it to undercut rivals on price and equipping the Chinese government with the most advanced tools for surveillance and digital oppression of its own citizens.No other company has drawn the world’s two most powerful leaders, America’s and China’s presidents, into a direct geopolitical stand-off. And yet Huawei, a Chinese tech group, continues to thrive. In 2023 its revenues were around $100bn, nearly twice as much as those of Intel, an iconic Silicon Valley firm.“House of Huawei” investigates these accomplishments and accusations. Eva Dou, a technology-policy reporter at the Washington Post, has parsed decades’ worth of Chinese documents to piece together how Ren Zhengfei, the company’s enigmatic founder, rose from poverty to lead what is probably China’s most powerful company. Huawei has gone from making basic telephone switches nearly 40 years ago to designing some of the world’s most advanced semiconductors today.Ms Dou’s analysis is timely. The group was the first of now many Chinese companies that have raised national-security concerns in Washington. On January 19th TikTok, a popular short-video app, temporarily shut down its product in America, before making it available again after Donald Trump said he would give it more time to secure a deal with an American partner (to avoid being banned). Not long ago Huawei was dealt a more serious blow, when Mr Trump banned the sale and import of communications equipment from several Chinese firms.For decades journalists and researchers have tried to prove that Huawei is state-owned and Mr Ren is a high-ranking military officer. Ms Dou explains how Mr Ren’s time in the army was actually largely spent doing low-level jobs, sometimes in a factory in a cave; he was not, as many in the West believed, a signals-intelligence officer. Huawei’s early shareholding records are convoluted. Early investors included people who worked at state-owned firms, and the group may have hired a plant from the country’s domestic spy agency to serve in senior roles.Some of this strikes at the heart of the West’s misunderstanding about how China works. In the 1980s China’s economy was dominated by the state; doing business with purely private entrepreneurs would have made Huawei an oddity. Analysts often look for direct ownership by state or military companies as proof that a company might be swayed by the Communist Party. But no such direct link needs to exist. As Chinese companies grow and become more important, they inevitably become more entwined with the state and the party. The largest internet firms,
Currently, TikTok is the focus of attention. However, Huawei took the initiative.
