House of Huawei |
|
25 March 2025 - Glattbrugg
I have always distrusted Huawei. So when I found Eva Dou's House of Huawei at the Zürich airport a couple weeks ago I couldn't resist picking it up to see if I could disabuse myself of the prejudice. Admittedly it's partly rooted in the fact that Cara bought a Huawei phone shortly before she divorced me. But I used to dislike Apple, and then the iPhone was my gateway drug to Mac, so, who knows? Dou follows the well-worn path of beginning the company's story with the founder's story. So she writes about Ren Zhengfei's parents during the war and then his travails as child during the Communist takeover, the famine they caused, and then Mao's Cultural Revolution. To have been trained in China as an engineer during the Cultural Revolution, Ren Zhengfei clearly had rare luck. Or connections. Dou weaves throughout her story the suggestion that men behind the curtain are pulling the strings and that her narrative is only the public face of Huawei. Still, it's a good story of successfull business building in the face of much more advanced competition in the telecommunications industry. Huawei's story mirrors somewhat the story of post-Mao China. First they made cheap knock-off copies and sold them locally. Then as industry and expertice evolved they were able to compete with and contribute to cutting edge technology. Not accepting US hegemony they sold even to North Korea and Iran while building Iraq's cellular network during America's occupation. But they'd already been selling to Iraq despite US sanctions before the invasion. Then when Huawei started leading in telecommunications patents and was writing the 5G standard, the US hit hard to assert its hegemony. Edward Snowden had revealed that US's NSA had hacked into Huawei's infrastructure and was using it to spy on the world. This formed the basis for the call that Huawei technology was letting the Chinese government spy on people. Dou insinuates the same. And Huawei helped China set up their surveillance state, with deadly consequences in Xinjiang for the Uygurs. But Snowden implicated American tech companies too. So, it was on the basis of ignoring US sanctions that Ren's daughter was arrested in Canada in 2019 and held for years under house arrest there. And the US pressured other countries to exclude Huawei from 5G network implementation. Dou does a good job of showing that Huawei is both a trade war victim and culpable for the technologies they've developed for use by governments aginst humanity.
