House of Huawei by Eva Dou
A fascinating insight into a Chinese telecoms giant and its detractors
Huawei is not exactly a household name. If youâve heard of it, you either follow the smartphone market closely â it is the main China-based manufacturer of high-end phones â or else consume a lot of news, because the company is at the centre of an ongoing US-China trade war.
But this enormous business is one of the worldâs biggest producers of behind-the-scenes equipment that enables fibre broadband, 4G and 5G phone networks. Its hardware is inside communications systems across the world.
That has prompted alarm from US lawmakers of both parties, who accuse Huawei of acting as an agent for Chinaâs government and using its technology for espionage. The company insists it merely complies with the local laws wherever it operates, just like its US rivals. Nevertheless, its equipment has been ripped out of infrastructure in the UK at the behest of the government, its execs and staffers have been arrested across the world, and it has been pilloried for its involvement in Chinaâs oppression of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.
Into this murky world of allegation and counter-allegation comes the veteran telecoms reporter Eva Dou. Her book chronicles the history of Huawei since its inception, as well as the lives of founder Ren Zhengfei and his family, starting with the dramatic 2019 arrest of his daughter Meng Wanzhou, Huaweiâs chief financial officer, at the behest of US authorities.
Douâs command of her subject is indisputable and her book is meticulous and determinedly even-handed. House of Huawei reveals much, but never speculates or grandstands â leaving that to the politicians of all stripes for whom hyperbole about Huawei comes more easily.
At its core, this book is the history of a large, successful business. That doesnât mean itâs boring, though: thereâs the story of efforts to haul 5G equipment above Everest base camp in order to broadcast the Beijing Olympics torch relay. We hear about the early efforts of Ren and his team, working around the clock in stiflingly hot offices, to make analogue telephone network switches capable of routing up to 10,000 calls; and gain insights into the near-impossible political dance a company must perform in order to operate worldwide without falling foul of the changing desires of Chinaâs ruling Communist party.
Dou makes us better equipped to consider questions including: is this a regular company, or an extension of the Chinese state? How safe should other countries feel about using Huawei equipment? Is Chinaâs exploitation of its technology sector really that different to the way the US authorities exploited Google, Facebook and others, as revealed by Edward Snowden?
Early in Huaweiâs history, Ren appeared to give the game away in remarks to the then general secretary of the Communist party. âA country without its own program-controlled switches is like one without an army,â he argued, making the case for why the authorities should support his companyâs growth. âIts software must be held in the hands of the Chinese government.â
But for each damning event, there is another that introduces doubt. The book reveals an arrangement from when Huawei operated in the UK that gave GCHQ unprecedented access to its source code and operations centre. US intelligence agencies seemed as able to exploit Huawei equipment for surveillance purposes as Chinaâs. While Huaweiâs equipment was certainly used to monitor Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, it was hardware from the US company Cisco that made Chinaâs so-called Great Firewall possible.
Anyone hoping for definitive answers will not find them here, but the journey is far from wasted. The intricate reporting of Huawei, in all its ambiguity and complexity, sheds much light on the murky nature of modern geopolitics. The people who shout loudest about Huawei donât know more than anyone else about it. Eva Dou does.
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