How dangerous is Huawei?

During Donald Trump’s time in office a growing realization that technology is not politically neutral led to a significant slowdown in Huawei’s expansion into Western markets. But when Trump lost the presidency in 2020, for a time the West stopped worrying about Huawei.  No longer.  The company has once again become a subject of debate on both sides of the Atlantic but the differences between the challenges Huawei poses to the US and those it poses to Europe, speaks volumes about the geopolitical weight of these two parts of the West.

The Americans are concerned that Huawei is becoming one of the key champions enabling the PRC to access technologies that act as “force multipliers” of geopolitical power. The Chinese company surprised Western experts with its Ascend chips, which — while not yet on par with Nvidia’s products — demonstrate a growing potential that, as some suggest, can not be halted by export controls. In other words, domestic ingenuity in semiconductors could allow China to catch up with the US in the AI race.

One school of thought argues that concerns about semiconductors are being inflated by Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, who wants Washington to lift export controls on Nvidia’s products. This, in turn, would deepen the Chinese market’s dependence on American technology and standards, making it more susceptible to US incentives and intentions.

In Europe, the problems are of a different nature. They do not center on who will lead in cutting-edge technologies. Recent controversies surrounding Huawei involve bribes allegedly offered by the company’s lobbyists to Members of the European Parliament. As a result of an investigation, said lobbyists were barred from access to the EU Parliament.

The House of Huawei by Eva Dou comes at a timely moment, as rising geopolitical tensions once again place the Chinese company in the spotlight. One of its key contributions is offering a deeper look into the figure of its founder, Ren Zhengfei, and the corporate culture he shaped within one of the most important companies in the world.

Ren Zhengfei cannot be fully understood without recounting the experiences of his father. Much like Xi Jinping’s father — whose life was recently examined in a biography by Joseph Torigian — he was part of the psychological drama that shaped the relationship between the Communist Party and the generation marked by the Cultural Revolution. 

His subordinates recall how he would invite them to lunch and recount battles from the Korean War

Ren Moxun was a Chinese patriot who ran a bookstore where nationalist literature sat side by side with Marx’s Das Kapital. In the 1940s, he became a school principal, and during the Great Leap Forward, he was forced to watch his students die of starvation. In the province where he taught, the famine claimed 10 per cent of the population. Then came the Cultural Revolution, a period of relentless humiliation. He was beaten with sticks in the streets until they broke, thrown onto a truck and paraded through the city before eventually being sent to a labour camp. He was released at the age of 66

Despite all the suffering, the terror of communism bound both him and his son, Ren, to the Party for life. Joseph Torigian describes the same moral dynamic in his book about Xi’s father. Loyalty seems all the more unshakable the more brutal the CCP’s cruelty becomes and the more irrational its violence. When Ren was finally admitted to the Party years later, it was an overwhelmingly joyful moment for him. The book quotes his words: “We were moved to tears because we were finally recognized as the ‘sons’ of this country. We were overjoyed to be part of the working class rather than the capitalist or intellectual class.”

An intriguing avenue for future research would be to investigate the extent to which this kind of sadomasochistic relationship sustained belief in the Party among Asian communists and whether it was a phenomenon that also occurred in the Eastern Bloc. My intuition is that in Central and Eastern European countries, such deep attachments to the Party following trauma were quite rare.

For many years, Ren and Huawei were connected not only to the CCP but also to the military. Zhengfei began his career in the army, working during the Vietnam War in a secret laboratory where fighter jets were being developed. His dedication to the cause knew no limits. A Chinese military publication from that time notes that he worked so intensely he suffered from insomnia, lost his hair, and was unable to eat.

It may seem that what most defines Huawei’s culture is the spirit of “9/9/6” — extreme commitment to work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — something unimaginable, for instance, in Europe. The legend of the company is built on stories of employees working with such intensity that their retinas began to detach.

But behind Ren’s military parlance lies more than just rhetoric. His subordinates recall how he would invite them to lunch and recount battles from the Korean War until, as they put it, their “blood was practically boiling.” Ren referred to his employees as the “iron army,” with managers as “generals,” engineers as “soldiers,” and so on. When considering someone for promotion, he would ask whether the employee had “been in combat.”

Work was to be treated as duty. Huawei staff didn’t abandon their posts in Sierra Leone even when the Ebola epidemic broke out; when civil war tore Libya apart, the team split in two to serve both sides. Chinese media claimed Huawei was the last company to remain in the war-ravaged country.

Huawei’s militaristic rhetoric and its view of work as a form of service worthy of risking one’s life are reinforced by a strong current of nationalism. Before the handover of Hong Kong, Ren addressed the company, saying that the consequences of the Opium Wars were still being felt and that weak nations would always be like sheep, devoured by wolves. His words echoed the ideology of national rejuvenation, a favorite theme in Xi Jinping’s political narrative.

The bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the intervention in Serbia further strengthened the company’s nationalism. It permanently altered Huawei’s identity but also — something often overlooked in the West — served as a catalyst for a nationwide push toward technological self-reliance. It was one of America’s major missteps, forgotten among its many patent mistakes.

Huawei not only embodies a military-style culture, but also maintains direct ties to the CCP, which exerts influence over major decisions. It would therefore be a misjudgment to assume that embedding the Party within the company was somehow against Ren’s will: Party representatives were granted veto power over executive appointments. In the first year of this expanded Party role, 12,000 of the company’s 61,000 employees joined the CCP.

In the early 2000s, Huawei received major support from the Chinese government. President Hu Jintao traveled the world attending deal-signing ceremonies, from the Philippines to Germany. The China Development Bank granted Huawei $10 billion to support its overseas expansion.

The West would adopt different strategies in response to Huawei. The Americans took one approach. When Huawei attempted to acquire the company 3Com, political opposition grew quickly, along with warnings of a threat to national security.

In the UK, Huawei was not treated as a threat; instead, frameworks were built to allow the company to operate. The Americans fully rejected Huawei’s presence, while the British — and some others in Europe — allowed for various forms of regulated or contained presence of Ren’s company.

Despite growing skepticism in the West, the company expanded and outcompeted their rivals in the less developed world. However, as Dou points out, Huawei also exported their technologies used for population management — in effect, tools of governance. The surveillance component is a significant part of the Chinese state, and Huawei is a key pillar of that surveillance system.

Huawei’s first major success came with its involvement in building the surveillance system for the Beijing Olympics. A significant next step was the Sharp Eyes project, launched under Xi Jinping, which aimed to cover 100 per cent of China’s public spaces with surveillance cameras. Huawei went on to sell its Safe City solutions to 80 countries. The company also provided financing to African nations interested in purchasing these systems.

There are many ways European countries could remain open to China. Joint ventures with Chinese EV manufacturers building plants in Europe could be one such path — a flow of know-how and technology might benefit both sides. However, Dou’s book portrays Huawei as a company closely connected to the Communist Party, guided — albeit not always explicitly — by nationalist ideology, and covertly supplying technology to regimes like the Taliban or Iran to evade Western detection. Now, not all Chinese companies maintain such close ties to the government as Huawei does, but some do and serious scrutiny should be the minimum requirement when engaging with them.

We should ask ourselves why a book about Huawei is only being published now. There ought to have been several by this point. Other major Chinese companies — whose global presence is increasingly felt in Europe, and which are poised to shape our markets, decisions, and environment — should also have their own “biographies.” Allowing ourselves to remain in the dark for too long will carry serious consequences in the high-threat world we live in.