House of Huawei: Eva Dou of the Washington Post on Her New “Secret History” of Huawei
Welcome to the Cynica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Guo, coming to you from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Cynica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I’m doing with the podcast, please consider lending your support. You can get me at [email protected]. And listeners, please support my work at www.cynicapodcast.com. Become a subscriber and enjoy, in addition to the podcast, the complete transcript of the show, essays from me, as well as writings and podcasts from all sorts of your favorite China-focused columnists and commentators. Check out the page to see all it’s on offer, and do consider helping me out.
When it comes to writing about the company Huawei, the challenge is pretty enormous. I know this because I’ve written about it. I mean, it was 20 years ago. But among many things that one has to try to right-size, even back then, is the extent to which you talk about it as a political story. As with any Chinese company above a certain size or above a certain level of significance, you can’t really ignore the political angle. But this is really especially so in the case of a company like Huawei. The problem is, of course, that not everyone is equipped to not only get the proportions right politically, but to write about the company also as a business, to write and report intelligently and excessively about its technology, which is its heart. To tell the human-scale story of the founders, of key personnel, of a lot of drama in the case of Huawei, a lot of drama. And then to situate all of that within not only the domestic Chinese political context, but also an international context. It’s incredibly complex.
So, for my money, Eva Doe’s House of Huawei succeeds on all of these fronts. It’s just a terrific book. And not just if you’re interested in learning more about Huawei as a company. In her hands, this becomes a vitally important book about China. She captures all of the contradictions, the good and the bad, the impressive, the unquestionably admirable, and the deeply problematic. And she contextualizes without being guilty of whataboutism. It’s the most even-handed treatment of this monumentally complicated company that has been written so far, and really one of the best about the country, too.
Eva Doe is a correspondent for The Washington Post. She’s a correspondent there. She has formerly written with The Wall Street Journal, and I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be talking to her about this fantastic book. Eva, welcome to Cynica, and congratulations on birthing two children recently. The book being, of course, the far less important of the two. But I probably couldn’t keep everyone’s interest if I just talked to you about your new baby. So, welcome.
Thank you so much, Kaiser, for having me here. So, Eva, before we jump in, I just have to say it’s hard to think – I kept thinking about this. Is there an American company that mirrors the story of the United States so well as the way Huawei mirrors the history of China across the last 30, 40 years? I mean, I know neither of us are the first people to have realized how Huawei is such a great proxy for the story of China. But I just got to say this, Eva, I absolutely love the way you structured the book to get that across. You didn’t lead people by the nose to this familiar idea, by now quite familiar idea, that Huawei is a microcosm of China. And when you did get there at the end of the book, you set it up and you delivered it in a way that was so insightful. It felt genuinely profound and managed to be fresh and exciting in a way that, my own rather banal observations just now in the intro weren’t.
So, we won’t spoil how you did that at the end of the show. I do want to ask you how much you’re willing to say about that. But, you know, readers can enjoy it for themselves. I wanted to tell you just how well that whole thing worked for me. It was just great. So, congrats.
Thank you so much. Really appreciate all the kind words. I think that’s sort of the mirroring of Huawei’s story with China’s broader development over the decades is exactly what held my interest in this project for long enough to get it done. It felt very much like a meaningful exploration of China’s journey writ large through the lens of this company. Totally. And you nailed it. So, that’s what held your interest. But what got you interested initially? I mean, when did you start working on the book? And was it like the Meng Wanzhou episode that made you decide to start writing it or what?
Because that’s what you lead with. Yeah, yeah. So, around that time, the Meng Wanzhou episode, the detention of the founder’s daughter, who’s also the CFO, during the first Trump presidency, is when I sort of realized that the raw materials to do this kind of longer longitudinal study of the company were there in a way that it’s really hard to find for hardly any other Chinese company. One that was founded in the 1980s at the dawn of China’s big experiment with capitalism and who has been there on the front lines of every wave of new policies since then. And not only that they’ve been there, but the documentation exists to be able to reconstruct scenes and to reconstruct a sense of what life was like along the way.
Still, I get the sense that it must have been pretty challenging to report some of this stuff out. I mean, they’re a pretty famously difficult company to work with, in terms of comms. Well, I had talked with them early on in the project, hoping to have their input on it. And at first they were pretty interested in the project, but in the end, probably partly because of the political situation, how tense U.S.-China relations are, they decided not to provide any comments for this project, which is a bit of a shame. But one thing that I wanted for this project was for it to be written from the viewpoint as much as possible of Huawei executives and Huawei employees. Because I think it’s just more interesting for the reader to be able to transport them to a place in time. So I relied quite heavily on speeches and writings and recollections of Huawei employees themselves.
Yeah, there’s a surprising amount of that out there. I mean, stuff that you referenced, you really did a great job of just combing through and finding all this stuff, pretty amazing. Just as a feat of reporting, I think it’s really impressive. Your book begins by recounting the 2018 arrest of Meng Wanzhou, who, as you said, was the company’s founder, Ren Junfei’s daughter, and also the CFO. Quickly, though, you take us all the way back to Huawei’s origins, and let’s just get this out of the way. To what extent do you think Ren Junfei’s experiences in the PLA actually shaped the corporate culture of Huawei in its formative years?
I remember when I was reporting on Huawei back in 2005, so it was around the time of the British telecom bid for their 21CN network. One source that I talked to, a British guy, was so dismissive of this question. A lot of people would roll their eyes, even back then, at this tired old allegation of PLA connections. He said something like, you know, if we couldn’t do business with anyone who’d previously served in their nation’s armed forces – and I think he specifically talked about the U.S. – we couldn’t do business or something to that effect. So, how do you think we should view Ren’s stints in the PLA?
Well, certainly, as you mentioned, he’s very much a product of his place in time, which is during the Cultural Revolution. There was hardly anywhere in China where you could pursue a career as an engineer. When you look at the people who had the training and knowledge to be able to start tech startups in the 1980s when that began to be allowed, it was very largely people who had worked in the military because that’s where you could continue to do engineering through the Mao years. So, in that sense, it’s not that telling that he had worked as an engineer for the military construction corps in China because that’s the background of so many tech entrepreneurs of that era. At the same time, you know, it very much influenced the culture of Huawei. That discipline and that sense of mission have carried through and have been integral to Huawei.
Just reading memoirs of people who have met and done business with Ren Yongfei over the years, like local Chinese government officials, one thing they often mention is that he has this military presence, this military bearing. Sure. Straight spine, even many years later. I think that discipline is part of the company’s success. I’m glad you mentioned that. My wife’s always getting on me to sit up straight, so I’m going to just straighten my spine right now. Maybe have a military bearing. I love the background you did on Ren’s parents and their imprint on him. When you wrapped up all your reporting on the Ren family, what were the things that impressed you as having been the most formative for Ren Yongfei himself?
I mean, Ren Yongfei has cultivated this image as this technocratic philosopher CEO. His father owned a bookstore. He grew up around thinking. It’s really interesting. I didn’t know a lot of this about him. Yeah, that’s one thing that came as quite a surprise for me in researching this is how much his father had documented himself of his own life and their family’s life. I feel that this is quite a meaningful part of Ren Yongfei’s story. His father had been a bookseller in his early years. He was a middle school principal and a college dean. After his retirement, he spent the last years of his life compiling a local history of the education system, which, in a way, can touch on politically sensitive topics in China.
He talks about the Cultural Revolution, what these schools went through, and it was meaningful to his father to document China’s history and to make sure it was remembered. That was sort of his last work. For his son, Ren Yongfei, this meant he grew up with this keen sense, as many people did in China of the era, of how dangerous and tricky politics can be and how it’s not all one thing or the other. You have to walk the line where you stay in the party’s good graces, but his parents were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. He knows that there are excesses, and some of it you have to figure out how to make your own way. Part of Huawei’s success really is just that it survived from the 1980s to today, which is sort of a monumental political feat, a feat of political savvy in China to not be taken down in any of the crackdowns that happen every few years along the way. I think that reflects the keen political sensibility and EQ that is present in Huawei’s management.
I’m curious whether you think that his public persona, which he definitely has an image that he’s deliberately cultivated, reflects the real him, the unguarded, unvarnished Ren. What was your sense of that? Do you think that there’s a difference? That’s a good question. Yeah, I think he is quite genuine in what he says. That’s part of his charisma, how he was able to motivate his engineers. He would give these kind of crazy goals for what they were going to achieve. People wrote it off at the beginning, but then people realized he was serious. The things he was saying, including in public, were really what the goals were that he was working towards, and he was serious about achieving them.
That reflects this as one of the world’s massive corporations, and there’s a lot of quiet management that goes on that’s not just his public persona. One thing quite interesting is that for much of Huawei’s history, most of the key positions in their leadership were women. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. Absolutely. It’s sort of unique in almost in China’s tech industry to that degree. For quite a few years, the chairwoman, Zun Yafeng, was a woman. I want to ask you a lot about her, but let me just say before we get into the women thing, this is something your book does splendidly. Most people who write about Huawei focus almost entirely on the person of Ren Junfei, right? I mean, it’s always been this great man theory, whether he’s a hero or a flawed character.
You do a very good job of taking us to other people. Zun Yafeng is one of them that you mentioned, Meng Wanzhou is the other, of course. But then there are also people like Eric Xu and many of the other people who end up being rotating chairs of the company. Let’s talk a little bit about this question about women. Do you think that this is a function of meritocracy within the Huawei system or do you think that this is maybe more contingent or culturally specific in the way that Huawei evolved? Was this just an accident, or was this deliberate?
Yeah, it’s a curious thing about Huawei’s management because its reputation is sort of like a bro culture type of company. Mainly male engineers sort of like trash talking, cursing, heavy drinking. But if you look at how their management structure has been for most of their history, in a Chinese company, top positions are the chairman, which was a woman, the communist party chief, which was a woman for their core engineering, their chip division, arguably their most important technology. The head of that has been a woman for many years. This is one thing that makes them just an intriguing company in China, where this kind of structure is rare. I think it reflects an emphasis on EQ in management, not only of an unruly group of engineers but also managing clients, managing the government. To build those relationships and navigate them is so important for a company’s survival.
You might have the whiz-bang technology and engineering, and that’ll be enough for a startup for a period of time. But really, to be a multinational company that can survive for so many years, a lot of it is building those relationships. You remember when we first got in touch, I was still working at Baidu, and you were a tech reporter for The Wall Street Journal. I worked directly for the CFO, who was a woman. There were quite a few high-ranking women in Baidu, and I thought that was fantastic. One of our top engineers, who also happens to be surnamed Meng, was just amazing. Jennifer, who I worked for, Jennifer Lee, who was the CFO, taught me so much. I learned an incredible amount from her.
But let’s get back to Huawei and to one woman in particular. Madam Sun Yafeng is one of the most enigmatic, also fascinating figures in the book. You describe her as wielding really outsized influence, even when she doesn’t have an official executive title. How would you characterize her role within the Huawei inner circle? And why do you think she remains so little known in the West? What people do know about her emerged in early reporting that she had worked for the MSS, for the Ministry of State Security, at one point. At various points, they are straightforward about it. In other places, they seem to try to obscure that fact or even hide it or deny it. But it’s pretty clear that she did. I mean, she’s written about it herself.
Well, I think her presence as chairwoman of Huawei for many years reflects the kind of company, the kind of line of business they are in, which is that they are a supplier to governments. They’re a government vendor, not only domestically but internationally. For that, diplomatic relations are very much tied into it. I think she was seen, both domestically and internationally, as someone who has a direct line to the government because of her work history and who, in a way, is reflecting the government position at Huawei. That gives her a legitimacy in negotiating with international officials and international companies. If you look at her work, she did a lot of the diplomatic trips for Huawei, where she was going to negotiate with officials in countries around the world.
The question that always seems to be at the heart of all of Huawei’s reporting is its ties to the party, to the state. You cite a figure at one point that I think it was like 20% of Huawei employees were, around 2007, party members. That’s quite a bit above the national average. I mean, that’s certainly above what it was at companies I’m familiar with. To what extent do you think this is about political necessity and the pragmatic need to navigate this very politicized business environment? And to what extent do you think that this actually reflects some ideological commitment?
I think the two are probably difficult to fully disentangle. From one sense, Huawei for years has hoovered up the best and the brightest young engineers in China. Many of them are party members because that is seen as something good students can do to help their careers. At the same time, I think Ren Yongfei realized early on that being on the right side of the party was a necessity for his company’s success. He’s told his employees over the years, you can have your say, you can do what you want, but you have to abide by the party’s rules. If you cross those, then we can’t help you. The company can’t help you. It is, in fact, a requirement. Their patriotism and your support of the nation is a requirement for working at Huawei, which, in some sense, is just what you say in China.
To another extent, it is true. In telecommunications, it is intertwined with diplomacy and their business around the world. It’s not possible to run a business with employees going rogue. I mean, you got analysts that argue that Huawei is essentially just a national champion, a tool of the state. Others will insist it’s a private company caught in a geopolitical tug of war. But, for me, it’s always struck me that it’s kind of a both-and situation. After all this research, where do you stand on this spectrum, tool of the state or just a victim of a geopolitical tug of war?
Well, I think Huawei is sort of like the winner of China’s managed competition experiment, China’s grand experiment in capitalism. This is kind of the result from the 1980s to the present. Huawei is, in many ways, the strongest technology company in China. I know you were at Baidu, so you might have… No, no, no, I actually totally agree with you. I fully agree. I certainly wouldn’t rank Baidu among the more powerful tech companies in China right now. But they received a lot of help from the government along the way, but they were by no means the only company. At every stage, companies were pitted against each other in ferocious competition. At each stage, Huawei emerged as the victor. And so now what you see is this is sort of what the Chinese model has produced for its economy.
I mean, there’s this long-standing question of whether Huawei would be able, theoretically, to refuse a request from the Chinese government for access to its networks or data. Did you find any evidence that went beyond just merely anecdotal? Did you find structural evidence that might shed some light on its capacity or lack of capacity to refuse a request like that? Well, you know, I didn’t find a smoking gun in that U.S. officials and officials elsewhere have said over the years that they haven’t seen a smoking gun necessarily. What I can say is in researching this industry, regardless of nationality, that companies do not have an ability to refuse cooperating with the government if national security is invoked. And that sort of manifests in two ways. One is asking the companies for help in an investigation or whatever. And another way, the second way is governments directly tap these networks, often without the knowledge of the companies. We all learned about this in 2013 with Edward Snowden’s revelations.
Exactly. I mean, those revelations are not just about PRISM and NSA’s surveillance of U.S. citizens, but also he had these revelations that were very specific to Huawei. I’ve always thought that was interesting because the kind of a Rorschach test for people who have these preconceived ideas about Huawei. Some saying, well, this strips the U.S. of any moral standing. You can’t criticize Huawei because now we’ve seen that you do exactly the thing you’re accusing. Others would say, well, no, that just proves that, hey, if we do it, they do it too. They probably do it more. They can’t be trusted.
Can you talk specifically about what was revealed in 2013 or 14 by Snowden about Huawei and tell us how you think about how that maybe changes the conversation, if it does at all, about Huawei? Sure. So part of Edward Snowden’s revelations for the NSA file leaks was that the NSA had hacked Huawei’s networks and was using them not only to understand the company and how it functioned, but also to use the networks to sort of monitor targets of interest, both in China and internationally, since Huawei’s network equipment is around the globe.
I think it’s probably fair to say that China’s government would be seeking to do something similar. That’s what intelligence agencies do. Any intelligence agency would not be doing a very good job if they weren’t able to tap networks when their rivals are doing it. So morally, where does that put us? Are we then hypocrites for accusing Huawei of that or are we confirmed in our suspicions and therefore justified in all the bans from core networks and so forth?
Yeah, I think it’s reasonable for countries to want to use domestic equipment for certain infrastructure, such as telecommunications networks. I think it comes down to a question of feasibility for most third countries around the world. There are very few network options. The United States and China have even a shot at creating some of these networks domestically. In every other country in the world, you have to use equipment from the U.S. or China, probably both.
For people in the world who aren’t Americans and aren’t Chinese, they often look at this question differently. They take it as a given that the great powers would be able to spy on their nations if they wanted to. Even for the U.S., building a purely domestic network is astronomically expensive. You can be on your high horse and have the stance that we shouldn’t use this equipment, we should use this other equipment. At the end of the day, it’s often a practical calculation that gets in the way of that.
I feel like I know there’s probably listeners who are listening to this by now and kind of getting angry that this has just been sort of a recitation of all these familiar allegations of perfidy that Huawei’s been accused of. I promise we’re going to talk more about what they do well. But I feel obliged to talk about a lot of this stuff. It’s always struck me how, especially early on, they’ve had a certain appetite for risk. When you consider all the times it’s gotten them in trouble, this starts pretty early on with some pretty cavalier attitudes about IP.
There’s that Cisco lawsuit in 2003, which is often treated as a very formative moment for Huawei. It’s this early brush with Western scrutiny at the very least. What do you think that episode taught Huawei’s leadership? How did it change, if it changed at all, the company’s approach to foreign markets and to intellectual property law?
I think that was briefly an existential risk for a fledgling Huawei. By that point, Huawei was pretty established in China in the early 2000s, but it was just making its first steps internationally. This threatened to wipe them off the map from the get-go. It really scared them. They took quite seriously this idea from that point forward that they needed their own IP portfolio to be able to expand internationally.
I think that was an important moment for them. The lesson was we need our own IP portfolio, not that we shouldn’t. That’s one lesson one could take away from such an experience, I suppose. The other thing, of course, is there’s something about that risk appetite that leads them always to take chances with working with embargoed or sanctioned states in Iraq and Iran. What is it about them? Is that something in their culture as well? Is it just they can’t access other markets?
It’s a persistent feature, right? They keep doing this and often getting caught. Sometimes it’s much more than a slap on the wrist. I think it’s two things. At the very beginning, they were a newcomer to this very technical market. For the U.S. and Europe, they pretty much didn’t have a shot at getting major contracts. They had to start somewhere if they wanted to build an international business, and that meant going to places that were high risk, where civil wars were going on, where there were natural disasters, earthquakes, tsunamis, where there were sanctions in place that made the environment tricky from a legal perspective.
These were some of their first orders internationally. There’s another aspect to it also, which is these telecommunication systems for many countries are run by the state quite directly. It’s very intertwined with China’s diplomacy with these countries. Some of these deals came about partly because of diplomatic discussions between China and those countries and were, in a way, sort of like a technology transfer from China to these smaller countries.
That’s interesting. Part of it was, I mean, this was made possible, of course, because they had an almost limitless line of credit from the China Development Bank. That was a big piece of their meteoric rise, especially in Africa, in Eastern Europe, in Southeast Asia. Twenty years ago, when I was reporting, people would tell me Huawei can go around and tell their customers, “Here, we’re going to build you this network. We’re going to give you all this brand-specific new equipment and all these space stations. You can start paying us in five years. Sound good?”
How important were those loans in enabling this expansion? Was this something that ties in with what you just said, that this was sort of part of development aid as part of state policy, state diplomatic policy? Yes. I would say this is not necessarily unique to China, but yes. For Huawei, these state loans to Huawei’s international customers played a key role in them being able to expand internationally so quickly. They weren’t necessarily the ones that came up with the idea.
Before Huawei was founded, China’s domestic telecommunications market was dominated by Western vendors. European vendors largely were using this model where they were providing China with this flying credit. Governments see there’s a strategic advantage to having their nation’s equipment on the ground, forming key networks in countries around the world, and they’re willing to support it.
One other thing going on around that time was while China was entering into the World Trade Organization after many years of negotiations in the early 2000s. Chinese companies, including Huawei, were quite nervous about the influx of competition in China that they were going to see. They felt they needed to go forward aggressively in building their own international businesses.
It was interesting. By the time I was doing this reporting 20 years ago, Huawei had just tipped into actually having more revenues from international sales than domestic. One of the things I kept hearing was that they were not winning bids in major provincial telecoms networks, not for core equipment. They had a lot of peripheral stuff and really rural stuff. But for major provincial telecoms, they were buying Ericsson or Nokia, or whatever it was back then, Alcatel because it was more reliable, tried, and true solutions.
That was really interesting because I think there’s this common perception that because they were a national champion, they were just a shoe-in to win all the domestic bids. It was interesting that they almost prioritized their international expansion over domestic. I thought that was fascinating, and you do talk about that in your book.
So, Eva, you described the company’s wolf culture and this relentless internal competition. It was totally different from where I was at Baidu at that time. Every time we hired some former Huawei person, there was an adjustment. They were so hard charging, really kind of abrasive. Often, they were kind of difficult to work with. Seriously, I mean, that is the reputation. I mean, I saw it a lot.
Every time I had discussions with them, I noticed they dressed differently. They had a totally different style. Admittedly, Baidu at that time, I’m talking about the early 2010s right after the pullout of Google from China. This was when I joined the company, and it was easy street. We could just exceed expectations quarter after quarter because it was just, and so there was kind of a complacency.
But I got to say, from my experience working there, it was lovely because everyone was just mellow and relaxed, and it was fun. You sort of took long lunches. There were nap rooms, ping pong tables. It was very Silicon Valley in the boom years. But the Huawei people were completely different. Do you think this kind of management style was essential to its success, or did it create liabilities when trying to project a more polished, cosmopolitan international image with their tough internal culture?
I think it was essential to maintain such a competitive cost structure and, to a degree, continuing to do so. They have had, for many years, probably since the start, sort of this Wall Street-esque, really hard-charging culture where people are weeded out mercilessly. Every year, they do layoffs, just routinely.
Can you tell that story? I mean, it’s fascinating, about the mass resignations. Yes. This is something that’s happened several times in Huawei’s history where they convince the staff of an entire department to resign. The first time it happened, it was their sales department that resigned en masse and then had to reapply, essentially, for their own jobs. This was voluntary resignations on paper, but there was very much pressure from the company.
This got them in trouble later on when they tried it again some years down the road. There was a government investigation into whether they violated Chinese labor law because of this. This is the kind of company they are. They are very severe on their employees, and a lot of people don’t necessarily have long careers there.
Man, I would never… Okay, anyway. For the later time, when there was the investigation into whether they violated Chinese labor law, what they had done was they had done this mass resignation right before the labor law came into effect. In the end, it was by the letter of the law. The law was not in effect yet, so they were able to do it. They just lucked out there. I don’t think they even thought about labor law as they implemented this.
It’s kind of nuts. It’s so cutthroat. Let’s talk about the Meng Wanzhou affair. The detention of Meng Wanzhou in Canada was definitely a turning point, not just for Huawei, but arguably for U.S.-China relations more broadly, certainly for the technology relationship. In your reporting, how did this event reverberate inside Huawei? What impact did it have on its corporate culture? Was it like a moment of crisis? Was it like a rallying cry? Was it important in the company’s myth-making? Tell us what it was like inside.
We have a pretty good idea of what it was like outside. There was a period where it was unclear if Huawei would be able to survive. It was sort of an ongoing onslaught, not just one thing, but a multi-pronged attack accompanied by the Trump administration. The most severe part being the sanctions that cut off their access to key technologies they needed to build their products.
It was sort of an all-hands-on-deck situation at Huawei. There was a lot of uncertainty in whether they could keep going, but it provided this sense of mission that they were willing to do what it took. Now they have survived. Their trajectory has been stunted very much by these U.S. efforts, but they have survived.
I guess that’s part of this broader question of how much consumer nationalism ultimately played in. They presented a narrative to domestic audiences in China that was pretty different from how it played in with the international media in the wake of the Meng affair. You noted that Ren Zhengfei did all these interviews. Were you part of that group of people that interviewed Ren in the wake of this event?
Yes, I had gone along to one of them that the Wall Street Journal was doing with him. Can you talk a little bit about that, about your encounter with him and how he told it at that point? What came across in those interviews was really sort of his leadership charisma. He was talking through a translator to mixed groups, some journalists who understood Chinese, some who did not.
Even then, it came across the way he tells stories, personal stories in relation to the company, the way he tells jokes. That presence has been the beating heart of Huawei and has motivated his engineers. It felt like he was trying to talk to a U.S. government audience and maybe a Canadian audience through this intermediary of the media. His daughter was on trial in Canada. It was kind of out of the question for him to go in person to the Vancouver court to provide a character reference for his daughter.
But he was sort of through the media for the first time telling his story from his perspective. It seems like it was actually even effective. Even though it contrasts so much because he really went out of his way to sound like this internationalist, this real cosmopolitan, talking so much about his admiration for the United States. At the same time, the messaging for the domestic audience was a lot of defiance and very jingoistic messaging, very rah-rah, go China. We are the Chinese champion.
Despite this disconnect, I think he seems to have been pretty effective in getting that message out. There’s a lot of quite sympathetic coverage of him coming out of those interviews. Let’s talk about one more kind of difficulty that Huawei encountered. That was, of course, its involvement in Xinjiang through the surveillance equipment contracts that it was working with a couple of the major face recognition companies, doing these public-private partnerships as well.
They drew quite serious criticism, especially after leaked spec sheets that showed checklists like, does it have the ability to identify ethnic Uyghurs? Yes, it does. Yes, it does. Check. What did your reporting uncover about how decisions on sensitive political topics like that are made within Huawei? What did you find out about that, and what was the reaction after this came to light?
Huawei’s way of doing business has been to support its customers, which in many cases are governments, domestic and international. Their pitch is that they’ll support you through thick or thin. When there’s a crisis, they’ll be the first on the ground and the last to leave when their customers need them. This has been very much a double-edged sword for them. It’s helped them win contracts, but it means that when there’s some sort of sticky situation going on somewhere in the world, they’re often there on the ground. This was the case in Xinjiang.
They internally gave these incentives for engineers to go work in Xinjiang, similar to other war zones like Afghanistan. Hardship pay; they knew this crackdown was going on, and they were there to support their customers. That meant they were involved in building these surveillance networks and, to a degree, in operating them.
How did they handle that wave of negative PR around that? They gave quite a limited response at first. When some of their brand ambassadors started to cut off the contracts and it was clear this was not an issue that would just blow over on its own, they changed tack and said this was something that should not have happened within the company. They were a little contrite about it.
Much of the global pushback against Huawei has centered on 5G, but it’s also the thing that Huawei can point to as its greatest accomplishment: how it managed to have so many of its own patents included in the 5G standard that was adopted. You have a terrific chapter in your book about that whole process. Was it Reno or Las Vegas? Reno, I think it was in Reno.
There’s a Turkish scientist named Erdal Arakhan. He came up with this revolutionary technology called Polar Codes, which is critical to the success of 5G. Huawei really favored this guy. They gave him the full red carpet treatment. It’s a story that Huawei loves to tell. You can’t blame them. It’s very wholesome and gives the impression of Huawei as a company that’s visionary, far-sighted, and grateful to people who have helped it.
But its success seems like it’s also part of what doomed Huawei’s prospects in Western markets because it was just so successful in 5G. Is that kind of right? What do you think led to this widespread blacklisting of Huawei 5G gear in the developed West? Was it U.S. campaigns under Trump or were there intrinsic vulnerabilities in Huawei’s approach? It feels like this should be the great story of triumph, yet there was a lot of pushback.
So the timing of the U.S. campaign against Huawei coincided with the technology cycles of wireless technology, which tend to roll out about once a decade. That is the moment when network operators around the world place new orders. These are massive orders for networks that will be running in the country for the next decade. This moment is essential for these companies’ business interests and their country’s strategic interests on the world map.
You see this happen every time a new generation is coming out. When 5G was happening, countries around the world were considering whether they would buy Huawei or another provider. That alarmed U.S. officials because they realized Huawei had fully caught up with Western vendors. In the 4G generation, they weren’t quite caught up, but for 5G, they had the price and the technology. This made U.S. officials very nervous that Huawei was going to sweep the world map.
You saw a very organized pushback campaign from the Trump administration in many facets to try to prevent countries from selecting Huawei at that moment. Back before the pandemic, I was talking to a really smart Chinese analyst who tracks Chinese investment abroad. He had kind of come up with this Huawei index, which said you could see where Chinese investment or other activity was coming from based on how welcome Huawei was in a country. If Huawei was integrated into their networks, you could imagine that Chinese were buying property there, investing in other businesses. Was it your sense that Huawei was – they must have understood this to an extent. Did they match – in other words, I’m wondering if the causal direction – was this like they saw that China was well-received there and then they would push to expand their telecoms business there? Or was it the other way around? Was Huawei the initiator and then sort of other Chinese money followed?
I think Huawei’s presence around the globe and the degree that they’re successful in their business in different countries, it’s very much – you could see it as a proxy of that country’s relationship with China. Yeah, yeah. So you agree with that guy. Yeah, I know. I totally thought that was so smart.
Yeah, and that – yeah. If you think about it, phone networks and internet networks, there’s such critical infrastructure for a nation that to trust it to a Chinese vendor who is getting state financing, it says something about your relationship with China’s government as a nation, whether you think it’s a good idea or a bad idea.
Yeah, and so this kind of proxy battle, it’s very much continuing. The U.S. government is continuing to try to push countries around the world to stop using Huawei equipment. And it’s kind of interesting to track which countries decide to change and which ones don’t.
Yeah, yeah. So in the era of sanctions, you know, when we saw, of course, ZTE have this near-death experience, really, literally a near-death experience. It’s cross-town rival, as we often describe it, which is actually state-owned. But we saw Huawei lean into chip development and other, you know, what China calls hard tech sectors.
Do you think it has the kind of institutional resilience and technical depth to succeed without access to advanced Western tech, or is this more posturing than promise? I mean, there’s the Mate 60 Pro, which was released, incidentally, right when Gina Raimondo was in town. Lots of stuff. But I have a difficult time kind of getting my head around how much of this is hype and how much of it is really real.
I think since the U.S. sanctions on Huawei came into effect during the first Trump term, I think Huawei’s fate has been sort of bound with the Chinese state more closely than ever, for better or for worse. That’s sort of not what we wanted to happen, right? In a way, that was not the intended effect of U.S. policy necessarily.
So I think it’s fair to say they’re not on their own in developing these technologies. We did see Ren Yung-fei go to Chinese universities and research institutions and sort of soliciting help and research in filling the gaps of their technology during the last trade war. And so they have succeeded for now, I would say. I think they are okay for this generation.
The question always is the next generation. Technological sanctions tend to have a lagging effect in that they have been able to fill the gaps for this generation, but will they fall behind in the next generation is kind of a question that is not yet answered.
Yeah, yeah, it’s a tough one. I mean, it was touch and go there for a little while, even in this go-round. I mean, it had its own near-death experience with the chip export bans and its handset business was gutted. It nearly collapsed. It sold off on her, right? All of that.
But, again, it benefited from this kind of consumer nationalism, this, you know, patriotic sentiment. It totally peaked with that phone that I mentioned, the Mate 60 Pro. It was in 2023, I think, right? I can’t remember the date. But that became kind of symbolic of Chinese technological resilience. It was proof that, you know, China could defy these external constraints.
And people were, as you write about, you have this really funny quote. It’s like the phone that was bought so that they could tear it apart. And they were tearing open the phones to analyze the chip and seeing what the actual node process was in the – it was like this geopolitical artifact, kind of, really interesting.
But, you know, Huawei, it seems to me, they’re so emblematic of China’s rise in high tech, like we’ve said. But, you know, it exposes a lot of the contradictions, the state involvement, the opacity, the, you know, sometimes behaving in ways that might be charitably described as ethically challenged.
But maybe no more so than any other comparably huge tech companies. I don’t know. After reporting this book, do you see Huawei more as an outlier or as a bellwether for China Inc.? Do you see it as – I mean, we – it’s a proxy of some sort, but is it a leading, lagging, or just a bellwether indicator?
Mm-hmm. I think it is – it is – you could take it as a bellwether indicator of sort of the state of China’s international relations and U.S. international relations. I would say within China’s tech sector, it is pretty unique in not only how many fields it’s able to be competitive in, but also its longevity.
So there’s a lot of Chinese startups right now that are quite promising, like the most recent one in the headlines, DeepSeek. DeepSeek, of course. Yeah, with this AI model that’s really rocked the world, I think it remains to be seen if any of these newer companies can have that staying power.
I mean, and Huawei seems to have, like, cemented its position at the very, very center of the ecosystem, I mean, with government help. I mean, it functions now like a national task force for, you know, semiconductor self-sufficiency. I mean, it really kind of is involved with Chinese firms up and down the supply chain in everything.
I mean, this is Paul Triolo, who you interviewed for your book and blurbed it, actually. He talked about not so long ago when he was on the show about, you know, how Huawei is going to be sort of the anointed coordinator for the entire process. And that makes a lot of sense.
I mean, its role in the ecosystem, though, my point is that it’s only gotten bigger. Has it become too big to fail, not in the financial sense, but as a pillar of national resilience? Are they now sort of immune? They’ve become so core to, I mean, almost an existential question now for China.
And does that come with risks? I mean, a company bearing so much strategic weight, that’s got to be, that’s not easy, right? Yeah, yeah. I think there’s both benefits and risks for the company because of this, benefits being, yeah, in a way it is sort of too big to fail.
It’s so interlocked with the nation’s headline goals that Beijing would probably move mountains to keep this company from failing if it’s, again, in vital danger. At the same time, it means Huawei is in the, continues to be in the target for the U.S. government.
Just most recently, we’ve seen the Trump administration, they overturned the Biden administration AI diffusion rule. AI diffusion rule, which the Biden administration was taking the approach of controlling U.S. chip exports to countries around the world to try to prevent them from filtering to China, to advance China’s AI industry.
And so the Trump administration, they reversed that and saying that this harmed U.S. businesses. But what they did do is they said using Huawei’s AI chips anywhere in the world, they would consider a violation of U.S. export controls. And so it was the only company named.
And I think that sort of speaks to their role and also the risk that it brings to be the national champion. Yeah, you got a painted target on your back now, right? I mean, Kyle Chan, of whom I am a huge fan, he wrote a really great sub-stack post about your book.
I’m sure it’s the first of several. I mean, he also really loved your book. And, you know, having him like your book has got to be a gigantic win because he’s somebody I take very, very seriously. He notes that, you know, their unexpected advances in AI chips and the Harmony OS have raised a lot of questions about whether, you know, U.S. export controls have lit a fire.
Have they inadvertently accelerated Chinese innovation? I mean, this is something a lot of us are talking about. I use the metaphor of, you know, like lighting a fire to the back of the frog and causing the frog to leapfrog where it might not have otherwise done.
You know, it was kind of happy, as I said recently on another podcast. I was on just kind of hopping along behind the United States and, you know, using imported, you know, chips in AI systems and everything like that.
So in your reporting, do you sense that this narrative of the sanctions actually backfiring, that’s clearly become a point of pride within China, within Huawei. But do you see that as like an exaggeration or is that real? Do you still see it in Huawei internally as like a hard-won survival story born of desperation or are they gloating? And what’s the inside Huawei take?
Yeah, I think you’re right in these sanctions have lit a fire under China’s tech industry to advance as quickly as it can. And I think what it means is you’re going to see further bifurcation of the U.S. and China ecosystems, which not that many years ago sounded just absurd, a notion that this globalized tech industry could fracture like this.
But we are seeing it happen. And I think the U.S. play, as we’re starting to see it with the Trump administration, is to try to restrict Chinese tech companies like Huawei’s access to international markets, which does to a degree, it affects their trajectory.
It means the sales, if the Trump administration is successful, it means the sure sales they can count on would be restricted to the China domestic market, which is nothing to sniff at, but still quite short of the entire world. It’s unclear if the Trump administration is going to succeed or not in that it could, as you say, it’s sort of strengthened resolve in China’s tech industry to succeed despite these restrictions.
Yeah, and that takes us neatly to the great conclusion question. You know, Huawei has long insisted that it’s a private company, it’s employee-owned and beholden to, you know, no state or party master. You show how it’s really not that simple at all, but I think the bit of genius that you hold for the end, which talks about the ownership and governance structure of Huawei, says, I mean, maybe the most important thing about Huawei, the party, and China.
I’m going to let you decide, Eva, how much you want to say here and whether you want to spoil the grand conclusion in the book. So completely up to you, but you want to talk about it all?
Sure, yeah, yeah, I’ll talk a bit about it, which one of the lingering questions about Huawei has been its ownership, you know, who owns Huawei, who controls Huawei. And I wanted to try to address this question as head on as I could at the end of the book.
And there’s some things about its shareholding that will probably continue to be opaque. You know, it’s not a publicly listed company and it’s not clear who really owns all the shares of Huawei. But what was interesting to me looking at their structure was really, if you look there, there’s sort of the traditional management layer, like the CEO and deputies at Huawei.
Above that, you know, there’s the chair, chairman level. And then above that, there’s shareholder representatives at Huawei, which this isn’t talked about all that much because sort of the simplistic way of describing it is just the shareholders own Huawei. And that’s true to an extent, but if you look at how the company is run based on its rules, it’s these representatives who are representatives of the shareholders who have this overarching power that goes above all the other executives at the company.
And these, they map onto sort of like the company elders, both the current executives and also some of the ones that have kind of retired to advisory roles. And they are the ones who really hold the most power at Huawei. And in a way that’s similar to how China’s government runs also, it’s…
Yeah, very, very similar. Yeah, yeah. It’s also sort of obscure by design exactly who is holding the power in this collective governance system. And that has both its strengths and weaknesses.
Yeah, and I think you take us, you lead us up to that through the entire book, like I said, but you save that bit for the end. And it really lands so powerfully. And it just sort of, I think it just ties it up so very, very neatly. I cannot tell you how much I admire what you’ve done with this book. It’s just such an accomplishment. Congrats once again.
Thank you so much. The book is called House of Huawei, The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company. And if you haven’t read it, and if you’ve listened to this show, as you obviously do, then I tell you, you are going to really get a lot out of it, no matter how much you think you already know about the company.
So, Eva, wonderful to talk to you. Let’s move on now to recommendations. But first, the segment I call Paying It Forward. I’d love you to just like talk about a younger colleague or somebody else just in the biz whose work you’d like to draw some attention to.
Yeah, thanks so much. And I’d like to give a shout out to some of my former colleagues at The Wall Street Journal and who are covering China, like the Chinese journalists at The Wall Street Journal. I’ve long been producing some of the smartest, really most in-depth, sober, insightful reporting on China.
One of the younger ones that I’ll mention is Raphael Huang. Really smart reporting on China’s up-and-coming tech companies, including DeepSeek and TikTok. And I always enjoy reading his articles.
That’s fantastic, Raphael Huang. Yeah, I think we’ve all been seeing a lot of his byline recently. So, that’s just fantastic. Great. And let’s move on to recommendations. What do you have for us?
Yeah, I have a few. So, the historian Joseph Terrigian has a biography of Xi Jinping’s father coming out. Have you already read it? I have it. I haven’t read it yet. I haven’t tucked into it yet.
It’s good, huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, that’s one of my recommendations. It’s called The Party’s Interest Come First. So, Joseph, he’s one of the most meticulous archival researchers out there on China. And he’s almost fanatical in how detail-oriented he is in his research.
And so, this really, this is the culmination of his years of research on the career of Xi Jinping’s father. And I’ve personally learned a lot from him and how he approaches research for researching sort of difficult historical subjects in China and really looking forward to this new book.
So, that is one of my recommendations. Let me just add that my favorite China commentator out there, Lizzie Lee, regards him as her favorite China academic. So, that’s pretty high praise. So, by the transitive property or whatever, I think I have great admiration for him. And his last book was great.
Yeah. I look forward to having him on the show. So, once I get through the book. Unfortunately, I’m going to be traveling in China. I’m probably not going to take the book on the plane with me. So, it may be a little while. Fair enough.
Another recommendation, another Wall Street Journal colleague, Yang Jie. So, she has long been doing some of the most insightful reporting on the Asia supply chain, both in Chinese companies and across Asia. And I think I speak for many of us who have worked at the Wall Street Journal’s Beijing Bureau that we’ve all learned from her elbow.
And I continue to learn so much every time I read one of her articles. Great. Great. I mean, that’s kind of a dual purpose, peg it forward slash recommendation. So, fantastic.
And then, the last one, I’ll recommend a novel, this novel, Perinesse by Susanna Clarke. It’s one that I really enjoyed reading, like in the aftermath of the pandemic. It’s sort of this surrealist piece of art that I feel expresses the isolation and strangeness of the pandemic better than sort of anything else that I’ve read.
On the surface, it has nothing to do with COVID. It’s about this guy who lives alone in this massive maze-like palace that’s full of statues and flooded water. This dream-like scenario. And the entire book, he’s just wandering this palace and he’s lost his memory. He doesn’t know why he lives there or who he is.
Sounds like The Lockdown. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was something that I read that really resonated after the pandemic and is just so beautifully written.
Oh, wow. Those are great recommendations. One of the problems I have is that I always like to read the novels that my guests recommend. And so the novel I’ve been reading is Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, which is just fantastic.
I mean, your former colleague Bob Davis recommended. So I don’t have a novel to recommend this time. I wish I did. But I mean, I’ll accept to reiterate Bob’s. But I do have a Netflix short series called Adolescence from the UK.
Have you seen that, Eva? No, but I’ve heard about it. Yeah, the hype is something it totally lives up to. It’s quite a feat of filmmaking in addition to being just really, you know, powerful, especially to somebody who’s, you know, in the not too recent past, raised teenagers.
It’s set in the UK in a smallish town. And it sounds like it’s in the north. But just great, great, great, great, great, great, great series. It’s only four episodes and you’ll binge it. I mean, just set aside four hours and just do it in one go. Really, really excellent.
And the other recommendation I want to make is Kyle Chan. I’ve mentioned him. I name checked him. But his fantastic writing on Substack. I’m going to have him on the show, obviously. We actually did a pre-interview some time ago.
And then I kind of chickened out. I was just sort of overwhelmed by how much stuff I wanted to talk to him about. And I just couldn’t fit it all neatly into one interview. And so we’ve rescheduled. But I’m going to get him on the show. It’s called High Capacity. Just go to high-capacity.com.
And he’s just so thoughtful on Chinese industrial policy, on all the stuff that matters. Just everything in the way that China’s innovation ecosystem works. He’s a postdoctoral student. And he’s quite brilliant. And he’s also a charming, charming guy.
So thanks, Eva. Again, man, that was a great book. And I’m really glad I took the time to read it. I just got so much out of it. So thank you once again.
Thank you so much. You’ve been listening to the Cineca Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited, and mastered by me, Kaiser Guo. Support the show through Substack at www.cinecapodcast.com, where there is a growing offering of terrific original China-related writing and audio.
Or email me at cinecapod at gmail.com if you’ve got ideas on how you can help out with the show. Don’t forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show this year.
Huge thanks to my wonderful guest, Eva Doe. Thanks for listening. And we’ll see you next week. Take care. We’ll see you next week.