So why was the plucky Chinese firm Huawei singled out for Western sanctions? It was a leading global supplier of networking hardware until the US claimed in that its devices sent data to the Chinese Communist Party, and forced most of its allies to join its boycott, including the UK.
Eva Dou investigates that story and much else besides in House of Huawei, a thorough and fascinating corporate biography based on archival research and many interviews with executives, officials and experts. His father, a teacher, was denounced by the Red Guards and sent to a labour camp during the Cultural Revolution.
But Ren graduated from college as a heating engineer, and was assigned to work at a military site building fighter jets. Over 20 years, he built it into a tech behemoth. But the million-dollar question for Dou is how much control the CCP itself exercises over the company. Was Huawei equipment, then, really listening in to Western conversations and reporting back to China? House of Huawei provides no clear answer, though some interviewed experts are quite sanguine about the whole controversy.
It was only when Donald Trump threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Britain that Theresa May capitulated and issued the edict to remove all Huawei gear from our 5G networks by Its facial-recognition systems promised to be able to identify Uighurs in Xingjiang province, and it sold similar surveillance tech to Iran, ignoring US sanctions.
Instead of killing Huawei, they have forced it into technological self-sufficiency: the company now designs its own chips and operating systems, and sells nearly as many smartphones in China as Apple does. It has a flourishing cloud-computing business, lays submarine internet cables in Brazil and Cameroon, and is partnering with motoring companies to produce self-driving cars. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism.
