By Kurt Johnson
CHINA
House of Huawei: Inside the Secret World of China’s Most Powerful Company
Eva Dou
Hachette, $34.99
Conventional wisdom somehow still holds that the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, as if 70 years of pent-up historical and ideological hostility could be torn down like so much reinforced concrete. Some things changed but, crucially, many did not. In the West business boomed, and drunk on the hubris of victory, we forgot about history, safe in the knowledge that all the countries now plugged into the global market would sooner or later transform into liberal democracies.
House of Huawei: Inside the Secret World of China’s Most Powerful Company is fascinating, not just as an account of China’s largest tech company, but as a rebuke to such presumption. The author, Washington Post tech reporter Eva Dou, understands that in the East, history kept ticking. She likens the tech giant’s dramatic rise to Sputnik, the Soviet satellite which, when launched in 1957, startled the complacent West from another illusion: their eternal technological supremacy.
Born in 1944, Huawei’s CEO Ren Zhengfei is the book’s central subject. Much of Dou’s material draws from interviews given to serve as a remote character witness for his daughter, Meng Wanzhou, when Meng was held under house arrest in Canada for company-related bank fraud. This highly publicised case became a proxy for rising tensions between East and West. Ordinarily though, Ren is tight-lipped, and readers must decide whether the material available represents the whole. Dou is reluctant to speculate, leaving many lingering questions to the reader.
Rightly though, she begins with the Cultural Revolution, a catastrophe of public humiliations, violent excess and starvation that defined anyone who lived through it. Ren’s father, a teacher and bookstore owner, was imprisoned in a labour camp for nationalist sympathies. Ren graduated as an engineer and weathered the fallout working in Base 011, a secret underground network of bases used to funnel weapons to Vietnam. Later, much is made of this military connection, which Ren waves off, one example of a pivotal question the reader will never learn the real answer to.
Huawei is China’s most valuable technology brand.Credit: Getty Images
Huawei begins life in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, China’s first tentative steps into global capitalism. The city hugs the Hong Kong border, built as a barrier to check capitalism’s “moral corruption”. Dou furnishes Huawei with the romance of a Silicon Valley origin story: instead of a garage, shop was set up in a greenhouse on the roof of a residential block. Here too were desk-side sleeping mats for exhausted engineers, but these were covered by mosquito netting.
Huawei becomes a domestic manufacturer of telephone switches desperately needed by the modernising country. Modernisation here meant “learning” Western technologies with the long-term plan of weaning the country off them. Despite Western engagement, both Huawei and China retain a Maoist cadre’s asceticism and gruelling work ethic. Ren’s trademark becomes using military lingo learned from his time in Base 011.
Through the 1990s, a decade when history hit pause, both Huawei and China grow spectacularly. By 2001, Cold War paranoia has reasserted itself, with the US increasingly suspicious that enterprise in China has been infiltrated by the party. Huawei is also haunted by the issue of stolen intellectual property, sued by CISCO for the alleged copying of a switch design, which, given both systems share the same bugs, seems likely.
Huawei’s exports to internationally sanctioned countries like Iran, North Korea and Iraq also come under scrutiny. Here we do get answers: Huawei upper management clearly knew the risks, having used shell companies to operate in Iran. This led to Meng’s arrest and China reacting by imprisoning two Canadian nationals, a heavily publicised affair that lowered the temperature between East and West to below freezing.
Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei.Credit: AP
Australia features as a US pawn, a member of the Five Eyes alliance that buckled under US pressure and committed to never using Huawei’s 5G network.
In truth, Huawei and the superpowers were all operating according to a playbook most had thought long obsolete. The US was so sure China was tapping Huawei infrastructure to spy on other countries because this is precisely what their National Security Agency was doing, as exposed by Edward Snowden.
Meanwhile, Huawei sold surveillance technology it knew would be used on China’s Uighur minority, bringing about a surveillance state so absolute that until recently, it had been the realm of dystopian science fiction.
Today Huawei is increasingly secretive and eschews Western engagement. The company has become a piece in the game between two paranoid superpowers locked in a stalemate, an apt definition for a new Cold War. That Ren is unable to provide a robust succession plan betrays a belief commonly held by those who lived through the first Cold War - that the younger generation doesn’t have the stones to fight the next. Dou’s book also hints that no amount of free market engagement could have ever made Ren, Chinese leader Xi Jinping or US hawks shake their deep-seated suspicion of the other side.
One can only conclude that no matter how much technology and capital accelerate the world’s spin, the degree of change will always be constrained by the span of a generation.
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