Founded in 1987, Huawei is one of China’s largest private conglomerates, employing over 200,000 people in 170 countries. It is not the biggest Chinese enterprise – the electric car maker Buy Your Dream has more than 900,000 workers, including 110,000 engineers in research and development. Huawei began as a modest telecoms venture, producing analogue and digital exchange switches for landline systems in a country with a poor phone network. These boxes replaced ranks of usually female switchboard operators of the kind you see in old films. The firm’s name roughly translates as ‘Chinese achievement’ or ‘splendid achievement’.

Several points are important about Huawei’s genesis. One is the extraordinary drive of its founder, Ren Zhengfei, who sought shelter from the raging Cultural Revolution – in which his father was persecuted – as an engineer in a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) factory that produced parts for the engines of combat jets. The idea of the army being a safe space may strike us as strange, until you recall that China’s greatest living novelist, Yan Lianke, was for many years a colonel in a PLA propaganda department before turning to writing full-time. After several failed attempts, in 1978 Ren joined the Communist Party. He had attracted much favour from top leaders, notably Jiang Zemin, after inventing a precision pressure generator.

Ren and some co-investors raked together the equivalent of $5,000 to establish Huawei as a private company in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone opposite Hong Kong. To be precise, Huawei was a ‘collectively owned enterprise’, a novel entity in a country with virtually no rules for the tiny private sector (Ren’s share is still 1 per cent, though Huawei has evolved from a stakeholder democracy into an oligarchy). This distinguished Huawei from its arch domestic rival, ZTE, which is purely state-owned.

Ren was responsible for fashioning the hard-driving culture of Huawei, with employees sleeping on mats under their desks until a job was done and a sales force told to act like ravening wolves wherever they were sent, sometimes for years at a time. Breakdowns and suicides were not uncommon, but Ren inspired his workforce with tales of derring-do in wars he hadn’t fought in. Ironically, one of the primary functions of the in-house Communist Party cell – about a fifth of Huawei’s Chinese workforce are party members – is to act as a kind of super HR department, monitoring and curbing bullying by management.

Nowadays, Huawei is a vast company which manufactures digital telecoms equipment such as cell towers, consumer goods like smartphones and TVs, autonomous driving systems, fibre-optic cabling, surveillance cameras and robotic control systems for ports, which enable a couple of people to operate every crane on site. Huawei sells more smartphones than Apple in mainland China, where most iPhones are assembled. Eva Dou’s book is a first-rate, highly informed and even-handed account of the company’s rise and rise. Her background is as a technology and politics reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Her book brims with human drama and incident, while the corporate and technological aspects are deftly handled.

Having developed in a country with few rules for private enterprise, Huawei adopted a gung-ho approach in its overseas ventures, being the first on the scene even in hot warzones like Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya where there were no rules at all. Its problems with the United States largely stemmed from the activities of a subsidiary in Iran, Ren’s daughter Meng Wanzhou having been gullible enough to sign some of that company’s paperwork. But one of the many surprises in Dou’s book is the eager involvement with Huawei of Western banks, notably HSBC, telecoms companies, including BT, Nortel and Vodafone, and IBM, which for a decade sent its management consultants to China to help Huawei. Huawei’s chips came from the US designer Qualcomm until it decided to make its own. 

Huawei moved very quickly from 3G to 4G and then 5G. The last step was an enormous commercial risk but it proved incredibly lucrative. The company lavishly entertained the Western great and good at its bizarre corporate headquarters, a series of copies of Western landmarks (including Heidelberg Castle) and site of a huge lake populated with symbolic black swans. Huawei also recruited the actor Scarlett Johannson for its smartphone billboards and sponsored the footballer Antoine Griezmann. Admiral Bill Owens, a former vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, smoothed its path into Western telecoms markets and politics.

Dou is especially compelling on the murkier side of Huawei. There is no doubt that Huawei was involved in creating electronic surveillance systems monitoring ten million Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, including facial-recognition technology and phone- and vehicle-tracking systems. But claims that Huawei is part of China’s intelligence-gathering operations overseas rely on flimsy evidence derived from a single clause in China’s State Security Law: ‘A state security organ may inspect the electronic communication instruments and appliances and other similar equipment and installations belonging to any organisation or individual.’ Huawei has insisted it would respond to requests by the Chinese government for information with a firm ‘no’ unless these were backed by the kind of court orders that enable Western spies to intercept phone transmissions. 

Nevertheless, in 2018 Trump ordered the removal of Huawei gear from US defence apparatus. The same year, Australia became the first country to extrude Huawei paraphernalia from 5G networks. When Trump threatened to exclude them from intelligence-sharing activities, other members of the Five Eyes alliance followed suit. The UK was predictably compliant after Theresa May’s brief show of resistance (this helps explains why the UK still does not have a decently functioning 5G network). In 2018, Trump also pressurised Canada, which was in the midst of NAFTA renegotiations, to detain Meng as she transited through Vancouver en route to the G20 summit in Argentina, citing Huawei’s activities in Iran. Meng ended up spending more than three years under house arrest in Vancouver before China’s detention of two Canadians on spying charges led Trump to change his mind, by which stage he had wrung a better deal out of Canada called UMSCA to replace NAFTA. A national heroine, Meng has become one of Huawei’s alternating CEOs, though her aged father is still boss of the remarkable company he founded on a shoestring.

Underlying these efforts is a desire in Washington, DC, to retard China’s economic development as much as possible. A lot of Western hysteria around Huawei stems not from what it has actually done but from fears of what it might do in the future. Outrage over its presence in the West should be tempered by the reminder of what Western intelligence agencies have actually got up to. America’s National Security Agency (NSA) began hacking Huawei’s internal emails, as well as Angela Merkel’s private phone, in 2009, while also exploiting vulnerabilities in Huawei’s source code to infiltrate the phone networks of countries that had installed Huawei equipment. At one point, the NSA was harvesting about five billion mobile phone records a day. Although Dou mentions that the UK’s cyber security ‘cell’ gave Huawei tech a clean bill of health, she does not appear to know that MI6 was mustard keen on the global adoption of Huawei technology, since it had found so many backdoors into the system for its own espionage activities. 

Huawei survives and prospers, despite Western suspicions and antipathy. There are plenty of morals in the story Dou tells.