Eva Dou on the 'House of Huawei'
49:05 Share

Before we get started, I just want to draw your attention to the fact that Chinese Whispers is nominated in the Political Podcast Awards 2025. The show is in contention for a few categories, but most importantly, every nominee has a chance to win the People's Choice category. If you enjoy this podcast, do cast a vote for it at the link in the description. Now, on to the show.

Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode I'll be talking to journalists, experts and long-time China watchers about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more. There'll be a smattering of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well. How did the Chinese see these issues? Among the casualties of Trump's trade war with China in his first presidency was telecoms giant Huawei.

Founded by former military engineer Ren Zhengfei, the company is a world-leading manufacturer of everything from telecoms equipment to smartphones. But it fell foul of Trump as it tried to become integral to the world's rollout of 5G, leading to a Western backlash and even the house arrest of Ren's daughter. At the centre of the row is a suspicion that Huawei is essentially a state-owned company, working at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party.

So as Trump prepares to go back to the White House, I tried to get to the bottom of the telecoms giant in this episode. Is it an arm of the Chinese state? How has it found such world dominating success? And can it survive a second Trump presidency?

My guest is Ava Doe, technology reporter for The Washington Post. Her new book is The House of Huawei, Inside the Secret World of China's Most Powerful Company. Ava Doe, welcome to Chinese Whispers. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Now, should we start with Huawei's founder, Ren Zhengfei? He's an engineer by background, but his youth was disrupted by the Cultural Revolution. So tell us about his pre-Huawei career. Yes, so Ren Zhengfei was born in 1944. And so through his childhood in

in Guizhou province in southern China. He lived through the Cultural Revolution. He lived through the famine. So by the time he was getting out of college and starting his career, it was still in the Cultural Revolution. And for science and technology, a lot of it was shut down, like academic institutions were shut down. And so he became a military engineer, which was one of the few paths you could take

in China at that time for sort of pursuing technological work. He was assigned to work in Guizhou province. And at the time they were building this aircraft base 011. And so sort of what he said is he was just an average construction worker that because of his background, since his parents were intellectuals,

He had to work his way from the ground up, including manual labor. He said he worked as a cook for a while. And there's actually newspaper clippings from that time. Like eventually some years down the road, he was formally named an engineer.

And he then went on to work in a state-owned enterprise. But as Mao dies in 1976, and then in the 80s, when Deng Xiaoping takes over, the military's importance was basically wound down. And so Ren was assigned to work in a state-owned enterprise in Shenzhen before founding Huawei. So I

One thing I was quite surprised to learn from your book was that he was already in his 40s when he founded this company. He doesn't really correspond to one's mental image of a tech entrepreneur. So tell us about what that time was like and what the company began its life as.

Yeah, exactly. And these days we think of tech startup entrepreneurs as being college dropouts, as being these very young people who sort of understand technology, who understand the latest trends. And this was not him at all. He was already 40. He was midway through life. He had had his first career in the military, which was sort of abruptly ended by this, you

nationwide ship to privatization. He was sort of laid off whether he liked it or not. And that kind of reflects how he went about entrepreneurship. So from one perspective, he always had this feeling that he had not enough time, that they were racing against the clock to really do something. And that he

the young people, they were all fluent in English. He only knew like some, he had studied English, but he was nowhere near fluent. He didn't really understand how the world worked. So he felt he had a lot of catching up to do at that point. And also he brought a certain maturity to founding Huawei. A lot of his planning is very long-term and very strategic, not just sort of what he's thinking in the moment, which is,

Often for some of these younger startups are more that way. Right. And what did the company begin its life as? So it began making telephone switches. Can you just explain what that is?

It's sort of the device that routes telephone calls. And so like multiple telephone lines will be plugged into them. And there's big ones and little ones. And the little ones was sort of like a hotel might have one. And they from the outside, there'll be one telephone line that goes in and then there's this little box and then they can plug in 20 telephones. Yeah.

in their hotel. So it was really on the scale of things, a very simple device that they were building. And they were a contract manufacturer for other companies. And that was how they got their start. And can you just take us back to the Shenzhen of the 1980s? Because by that point, it had been made

one of China's first special economic zones. But it was still an odd time, despite the marketization, because it was such early days. So what I imagine is that the private and the public sectors are kind of trying to figure out their way around each other in this new world.

Yeah, it was a very exciting time to be in Shenzhen, you know, in this nation that had known nothing but a planned economy. Now a market economy was being allowed in this special zone. The rules were different there than anywhere else in China. And it was geographically Shenzhen, it's on...

brink of Hong Kong, which at that point was a British colony and was seen as very fashionable, very cosmopolitan. Just the, you know, the young women were wearing short skirts and the men were wearing Western style suits instead of mouse suits. And

So there was a lot of Shenzhen's culture was sort of modeled off Hong Kong's. And there was a lot of interchange, cultural interchange between the two. The state had the critical role of planning this special economic zone and sort of letting it run. But it was very much a radical experiment in sort of letting capitalism out.

play out and to see what happened when you did it in a controlled setting, which, you know, there were barbed wire fences separating Shenzhen, the special economic zone from the rest of the country. Oh, wow. In case of contamination. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, it was this experiment of if you build a place like that, can you attract

from around the world? Can you attract R&D from around the world? And this really became an economic engine for Trinos Rise. It turned out to be very successful. And they did...

managed to attract leading technology companies from around the world. I mean, Huawei quickly had success as well by 1991. So four years into its founding had over 100 employees. I mean, that's the kind of success that will lead to detractors later to say, you must have had government help on this. You know, how did you get such big success? What do you think is the answer to that question? How did it have success in those early years? And as we continued throughout the years? Well,

I think at that era of China, they certainly had government patrons and government help, and it would have been impossible otherwise for a company to succeed. And so I think there's two points here. One is there definitely was sort of government patronage in this company getting off the ground at the beginning.

At the time, there was no real established market economy. That probably was the only route for a private company to get started. And sort of the other part of that is that it wasn't only Huawei that had this government support. You know, there were many companies that it was competing against at that point and through the years. And part of what made Huawei unique is that it just survived.

In China, there's been wave after wave of anti-corruption crackdowns where executives have been hauled off to jail, where companies have been shut down, and Huawei has

has shown, you know, remarkable political surefootedness and being able to still be surviving after all this time. Yeah, absolutely. And I was struck by the kind of very early days industrial policy that was coming from the state. I mean, of course, you know, coming from a planned economy where the politicians were

are already thinking about the economy in terms of planning it. But, you know, even in this marketization era, there was very strong feeling of we are going to help Chinese companies. So, for example, in the 1998 five-year plan, I think the Chinese government had already determined that it would purchase half of its telephone switches from domestic companies. And that's the kind of industrial policy, presumably, that did help. Yeah, definitely. And Huawei, even in sort of the early days in the 1990s, was

benefiting from, as you pointed out, there would be quotas for how much of their telephone switches they were purchasing domestically rather than from these major international brands. And even that, it was not enough for most of Huawei's competitors.

Which a lot of them, they did go out of business over the course of the years. And so it was really that perfect mix for them, that they were both receiving sort of like the helping hand of the state, and they were enormously helpful.

competitive on their own right. And is that to do with this so-called wolf culture that Renjun and Fei like to talk about? Yeah, exactly. And this is in a way kind of similar to what people think of Wall Street culture, just very cutthroat.

You know, you either succeed at your job or you're out by the end of the year. Every year they had, you know, sort of a routine cullings for the lower performers on each team sort of every year. And at times when Ren Yongfei was not pleased with how the company was performing, it would be very widespread criticism.

sort of demanding that managers resign en masse and then for them to reapply for their own jobs. And as well as being a hard worker, Ren Zhengfei strikes me as something of a pragmatist. You know, you make the mention of the other tech companies around at the time. And one of them was, you know, a company run by Wang Renlan, who was an early tech entrepreneur, but had supported the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

Ren Zhengfei just stayed out of it, didn't he? I mean, he seems to me a political pragmatist as well as a hard worker. Yeah, yeah. So Stone Group, Wen Ren's company, was the leading high-tech company in China in the 1980s. And so in this book, I sort of look at the comparison of these two companies and sort of the big lesson of Stone Group that

that other companies like Huawei took away is you can't get involved in politics where you are opposing the government line. Like they advocated for the democratization of China and supported student protesters and that sort of sealed the company's fate and they were never really able to recover from that even with like complete turnover of management. And so Ren and

his other senior executives have told their employees throughout the years that

They cannot get involved in politics, that they have to sort of follow the law in China. And that's just been a pragmatic approach for them. And I want to talk a little bit about the other factors for success then. When people talk about the Chinese tech sector, there's often this idea that it succeeded, especially in the early days, by copying or by stealing intellectual property from its competitors, whether they are Chinese or more often Western companies.

Does that framework apply to Huawei as well? And if so, did it start innovating in its own right at some point? I think legal IP protections came quite late in China. And so for a long time, it was kind of the Wild West and just very cutthroat competition and rampant copycats. And Huawei was on both ends of that.

where in the early days some of its products were basically rip-offs of competitors' products, including both domestic Chinese rivals and also foreign ones like Cisco. And in later years, they also were on the other side of that, where other Chinese companies were copying their products.

And that was just a very cutthroat and sort of lawless business environment that existed in China for quite some years. But did it start innovating in its own right at some point? Or is that where success comes from, from copying? Well, I would say copying got them off the ground. From the early days, I think Ren did...

have very high aspirations. He wanted to not just be a manufacturer, not just making the same product as other people, but he wanted to really have their own IP and to be a technological leader. And so from their early days, they would invest at least 10% of their revenue back into R&D, which at that time was a lot for Chinese companies in their industry. And

It was really when the arrival of 5G came that people kind of realized that, you know, they really have made major strides in their R&D capabilities. They're filing more patents than any other company in the entire world. And, you know, they have more 5G essential patents than any other company. And this was a wake-up call to a lot of Western policymakers that, you

Huawei had actually succeeded in becoming an R&D powerhouse, that it wasn't just talk. Yeah, I like the phrase that you use calling it the Sputnik moment. Impact that for us. The Sputnik moment is sort of back in the Cold War when Russia had launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik.

it really alarmed the West as to how had this happened and sort of accelerated the space race. And I think a similar type of thing happened at the beginning of the first Trump administration. It just sort of happened to coincide with the 5G generation of wireless communications being rolled out and people starting to realize that, wow, this one Chinese company that a lot of people had discounted

It's heads and shoulders, the market leader around the world. And how did this happen? Like communism was not supposed to be able to produce competitive companies and technological innovation, but somehow it had happened. And that, as we've seen, has led to...

quite a number of major policy reversals in the United States, in the UK, and in other Western countries about how they deal with technological transfer to China for their own industrial policies and sort of a shift in worldview.

And it just kept adding more to its product range as well. It had smartphones by the 2010s, and you even mentioned its in-house semiconductor production facilities and AI research lab. I also want to talk about its global expansion.

What did that look like? And is it fair to say that when we look at Huawei's global missions, you can again see Ren Zhengfei's resourcefulness or, shall we say, pragmatism when it comes to playing by the rules? Because he worked with quite a few different countries that were maybe considered rogue regimes. Yeah, exactly. And so this was a business strategy that worked until it didn't for Huawei in that

At the beginning, when it was trying to globalize, it found it very difficult. You know, there were established players, almost all Western ones, that built these telecommunications networks. And these are these...

systems, they're so expensive and they're so critical. And there's very much a national security aspect to it that a government is not going to choose for the most part, just a total untested vendor who has no track record. So they found it very difficult to get orders in the early days and sort of by necessity,

started working for rogue regimes like the countries that Western companies were either restricted from doing business in or didn't really want to do business in. They didn't judge the actions of the governments that they worked for. They were sort of a hired gun. They would work for any government around the world. And indeed, they did work in

gray areas in a number of countries. And eventually in Iran, this is where what got them in trouble in the end, which was they were skirting sanctions there. And for a long time, it just no one really cared too much. And then one day,

Under the first Trump administration, they did. People did care. And that resulted in very much a crisis for them. Right. And let's get on to that very shortly. But just briefly on the global expansion point, I thought it was funny to the point about Ren Zhengfei's wolf culture. He had these hardship postings for his senior executives. Tell us about the hardship postings. It almost felt, I mean, it felt quite military. Yeah, yeah. It was very much part of their culture that...

especially in the earlier days, that to be able to rise in the ranks of Huawei's executives, you had to have done overseas postings and difficult and hardship postings. And whether that's war zones, whether that's where natural disasters are happening, and you needed to prove that, you know, you were willing to do the work, that you weren't just someone sitting in a cushy office chair.

And it was made a requirement that you had to work these overseas postings to be able to be promoted at Huawei. And throughout this global expansion, then, how much did the Chinese government help with Huawei's ambitions? Because sometimes Ren Zhengfei would accompany, literally accompany Chinese statesmen on their foreign trips, right? Well, I think this sector for phone and internet access

networks, they are critical infrastructure in every country. And so they do operate on a spectrum from being pretty closely regulated private industries in some countries to being industries that are just controlled by the state and operated by the state in many nations. And so there's very much a diplomatic aspect to getting these kind of contracts. And that's

Yeah, often what we've seen in Huawei's global expansion is these contracts will be announced on the occasion of sort of a visit by a senior Chinese official to this country, like China's premier or sometimes a president would be meeting with the president of that country. And during that visit, they would announce a series of deals and Huawei would be part of that.

That then makes it hard for them to say we're just a private company then, doesn't it? Well, I think it's an industry that is very heavily regulated in every country. And that definitely has a security aspect because these pipes are carrying the information of the entire nation. You know, phone calls, internet traffic.

And so I think, you know, a lot of the companies that work in these sectors, they are business people first and foremost, and they want to just do business. But the reality is there's a lot of politics involved in the business of this sector. Right.

Right, because it's so heavily regulated, so inherently you have to have governments on side. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, yes. And so let's talk about those security concerns then. Tell us about what it is that people are scared of Huawei for. So the pipes that they built, they're carrying phone data and internet data for countries. So from that perspective, they...

are an obvious threat or a target for an espionage. So the concern is that Huawei, being the vendor, would be able to give China's government a backdoor or potential future possibilities to put a backdoor one day into these networks. And how much do you rate those concerns? Do you think that they are legitimate?

Well, what we know is every country has intelligence agencies, and that's their job to gather intelligence abroad. And we know this is something that does happen. And it's not only China that does it. Countries do this. And from Edward Snowden's revelations, he had revealed that

that the NSA was tapping exactly these kind of networks around the world, including through Huawei equipment. Right, so the American NSA was tapping Huawei equipment

Yeah, yeah. So which that is, in a way, concrete proof that these networks can be tapped through Huawei equipment. And more recently, on the other side of that, we've had like these salt typhoon hacks that were revealed in the United States where China-based hackers had...

sort of extensively infiltrated US networks and is right now a major policy issue being discussed in Washington is how they respond to these hacks. And so then the fear is if the Chinese government asked or perhaps it already is happening now in some people's imaginations, could Huawei really refuse that kind of data? Or could the Chinese put some kind of backdoor tapping it in a way that the NSA did?

It does seem a bit hard for Huawei to say no in those circumstances, doesn't it? Considering its success and how much it relies on the Chinese government's large S to succeed. It might not want to, but it feels like Yuan Zhenfei would struggle to say no. Yeah, so I think...

Sort of the rationale for among Western policymakers and removing this equipment is partly just you can't prove a negative. It's impossible to prove that there never will be a backdoor that's put in and that the company would never help China government in intelligence gathering operation. And I think...

That's something that Huawei has run up in Western countries. And on the flip side, Western tech companies have also run up in their expansion efforts in China. And I think that... In a sense of like a reverse suspicion that the Chinese are suspicious of Western companies in China. Yeah, yeah. So in sort of like critical...

systems in China. They've also been trying to take out Microsoft and Google and Apple. And I think that's something that at the end of the day is going to be impossible for a tech company to prove or disprove, to prove that they will never present that risk if a government is concerned about it. But is there a point that there are some governments and some companies that would

have a different risk profile, as it were. You know, of course, the Apples and the Microsofts of this world perhaps really can't say no to the FBI if the FBI requests a certain information. But at least the legal system in America, the corporate structure of these companies, the democratic nature of these governments means that something like that is less likely to happen, or at least that whistleblowers would come out.

But in the Chinese instance, with the Chinese government and with a company like Huawei, the risk profile is higher because it just seems so much less transparent. I mean, it's not all just black and white, right? There's a spectrum of how...

vulnerable, let's say, a company might be to what a government asks of them. Yeah, I think one thing we know of is rule of law in China is not as robust as in some Western countries. To say the least. Yeah, yeah. And so there is that. But even putting that aside, there are laws on the books in China, also in the United States and in countries around the world that

are obligated to help the government in certain circumstances where national security is invoked, and they're also obligated to not speak about it publicly. So that is a thing. And, you know, after Edward Snowden's revelations of the NSA hacks, there was sort of more transparency in the industry than ever before about this.

exactly what is going on and sort of what we learned in the aftermath of that is the first line that a government would go to is is not necessarily a company like huawei it's usually the telecom operators who would get these requests for cooperation and the networks themselves

Yeah, yeah. But at the same time, there are also, you know, part of Snowden's revelations was that backdoors, if you will, had been put in some Cisco products that were being shipped overseas. And this was, as far as anyone could tell, not with Cisco's cooperation or knowledge necessarily. They were intercepted en route and then put back into shipment. And so...

this is something that happens. And sort of I use the American examples because the U.S. does have this sort of whistleblower history with people like Edward Snowden who have revealed some of these things that are considered government secrets. And yeah, in China, there's been much less of that. And so in a way, we just...

have less insight from the outside of these kind of things in China. Although you do mention one incident, which is Huawei equipment being used in the African Union. And then there was suggestion that actually data was being sent back to Beijing. Tell us about that. What was that about? So China had donated the funds to build the new African Union headquarters. And part

part of that was computing equipment that was supplied by Huawei. And what they discovered at some point was that data was being sent back to China during the night. And

The thing there was they never could quite prove, you know, how this happened or who did it. So, yes, it was Huawei equipment. But was it Huawei that knowingly did it or was it someone else using it? And so I think in these kind of situations, it's very hard to prove definitively necessarily how it happened. But even if it wasn't Huawei that did it?

did it, surely it shows that Huawei is vulnerable to other people taking advantage of its networks. Exactly. And so that has been sort of the argument and approach that a lot of Western policymakers are taking now, which is that, you know, this equipment is

Yeah.

whether or not we can get to the bottom of how this vulnerability got there. Yeah, I mean, it's just hard to believe that if it's not Huawei itself, then it would be presumably the Chinese government that's done this, which is something of an odd situation, to say the very least. And it also raises questions about China's kind of global south relations when it comes to things like the Belt and Road, when it comes to these donations that it gives to the developing world.

Yeah, yeah. I think that incident does speak to the concerns of Western nations, of Huawei,

sort of its global footprint and its role in China's sort of cultural diplomacy around the world. When you are involved on the ground in building these technological networks, it does, in a way, create opportunities for your nation's government in various ways. And

And let's talk about, you know, earlier you mentioned Iran and how it got Huawei in trouble. And of course, you're referring to the arrest of Meng Wanzhou in 2018. She was just transiting through Vancouver Airport before she was detained and then she was under house arrest for three years. Why was she arrested? She was arrested as part of a case that the U.S. Justice Department had been investigating against Huawei for six years.

sanctions violations in Iran from years ago. It wasn't really the recent years. This was going back years and years that there had been these violations. And Meng Wanzhou's

as she was CFO at the time and then earlier had been working in Huawei's finance department. And in that way, her name was on documents that linked her to these operations, these shell companies, if you will, that were involved in Huawei's business in Iran. And that was the explicit reason why she was detained. But at the time,

Sort of the bigger picture is that the Trump administration had identified Huawei as sort of a major security threat and a policy target for them. So then it does seem like possibly it was a politically motivated arrest in the sense that obviously these are sanctions flouting.

But as you say, they were historical. And it also came at a time of the trade war and more and more campaigns against Huawei from the Trump administration anyway. And there's no accident, let's be clear, that a senior executive who was arrested was Lin Zhenfei's daughter. So that all seems relatively targeted. And China almost immediately retaliated with the detention of the two Michaels, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig. Again, going back to that question of how independent is Huawei,

It seems like an odd move for a government to do this on behalf of a private company to kind of retaliate against two Canadian nationals because the daughter of one of your main entrepreneurs has been arrested. Or do they always see it as like an anti-China move?

Well, definitely. I think this entire incident was very shocking for people in the business community in that it was a kind of gloves off moment where the U.S.-China rivalry was kind of exposed. Like hostage taking was nail on the table as a tactic to try to pressure the opposition. And that was shocking.

not the way these things operated before. And that very much accelerated the sense on both sides that, okay, now we're in a new era, we're in this Cold War environment, and we have to rethink how we do a lot of things. Now, of course, if any listener here is very supportive of the Chinese government or the Chinese narrative, they might say that actually the two Michaels

were, you know, charged with espionage. They were simply just spies. You know, what do you say to the charges against them? You know, is it fair just to say, call this hostage diplomacy? I think for these kind of cases in China, they're very secretive. And from the outside, probably we'll never quite know a lot of the details involved in the cases. Michael Kovrig has been very vocal in saying that, you know, these were false charges that were put against him.

And in any account, the timing, I think the timing and sort of remarks by officials made clear that this was a retaliatory move. It was not just, you know, a spy case that...

just coincided and had nothing to do with Huawei. And especially in the moment of their respective releases as well, because once Meng Wanzhou struck a deal with the US Justice Department in 2021, the two Michaels were then also freed. It does feel quite transactional in that sense.

Yeah, yeah. And the governments never acknowledged that it was a prisoner swap, but they were released at exactly the same time after extensive diplomatic negotiations. And the

And Canada's role in this is really interesting because I hadn't realised until reading your book about the internal debate inside Canada about whether or not this was a good idea to basically arrest someone for extradition to the US on the request of the US and whether or not it actually, you know, from Canadian perspective, was actually the right thing to do. And that brings me on more towards how the Trump administration basically tried to get its Western allies involved

It seemed like there was a fair amount of arm twisting into not using Huawei. Definitely, definitely. And, you know, each nation's government has their own considerations of what's best for the country. And for a lot of countries, maintaining Huawei

trade relations with China is important to them. And suffering sort of economic retaliation from China to help with the United States' policy objectives is...

just something that, yeah, officials in other countries feel quite conflicted about. And we saw that in Canada in that case. It very much played out in the UK during the first Trump administration. And that was sort of target number one for the countries that the Trump administration wanted to get on board in this ban on Huawei. And it was a very difficult decision for UK policymakers in that they're

They did not want to just be taking orders from Trump. And they had made their own assessment of the risk, the risk assessment of Huawei equipment that had been put in the periphery of networks. And they found it a bitter pill to swallow to reverse their own opinions because Trump said so. Yeah, so that was a major point of contention. And in the end,

the UK did reverse its position, partly under the threat that the United States was going to cut off certain cooperations with them if they didn't. And of course, it's around this time that Ren Zhengfei started welcoming international media into the company, this company that has never really sought publicity before, always worked in the shadows.

And here I just want to take a brief aside and just talk about its campus in Shenzhen, because Ava, this is crazy. And for anyone who has access to a phone or computer right now, I just urge you to kind of Google some photos of it while we're talking about this. This 1.2 kilometer square site outside Shenzhen where they built 12 miniature European cities and Ren Zhengfei welcomed international media into the campus. Tell us about that campus.

This is the kind of thing that has to be seen to be believed, that they built this R&D campus that's modeled after famous palaces and castles around the world. Like there's a replica of the Palace of Versailles from France. There's a Heidelberg Castle from Germany. And it's just so over the top and so bizarre and speaks something to us.

Ren Zhengfei and his executive teams, their mentality of sort of manifesting their own reality, like they were this little switchmaker in Shenzhen that everyone discounted from the beginning, that it seemed these goals that they had to be a global high tech company.

It was something that was laughable to anyone serious in the industry at some point. And they just set very unrealistic goals and then figured out how to achieve them. And that's kind of reflected in this bizarre campus.

totally over-the-top campus of castles that they have in southern China. But also very Eurocentric for a man who's often portrayed as a kind of red through and through, as it were. Yeah, yeah. And that's partly this campus...

Definitely one part of it is to impress their customer base, their customer base being telecom executives from around the world. And you have to remember, a lot of these are developing nations that are their core clientele. So something like this, in their minds, proves their worldliness. They're not just a Chinese company. You might be a telecom company.

executive from anywhere in the world and you fly in there and what you see is Europe, not China. So there's definitely that aspect of it. And more seriously then, that Ren Zhengfei at that point welcomed in international journalists. Was he panicking basically? His daughter was still under detention. Trump was going against him in many of his major markets. Was he worried he's on a back foot?

Yeah, certainly. This was a move that showed there what sort of a crisis they were in. This is not the media approach he's taken any time, any other time in his life. He's very much been averse to media interviews and taking a high profile. But sort of these interviews served as a proxy both for him personally

testifying in his daughter's court case in Canada, which he was not going to travel to Canada and do that in person. And also sort of speaking to the Trump administration. So you could see

through his remarks then in these interviews and sort of the points that he repeated over and over again, that there was this urgent purpose. He was trying to get a message across both to Canada and the United States at that point. And because of that, it did provide this remarkable window into Huawei where he and some of his senior executives were speaking directly to

journalists and answering their questions in a way they have not done before or since. And of course, the US targeting of Huawei wasn't just getting a ban in its ally countries. It wasn't just arresting Meng Wanzhou. It was also sanctions, export controls on some of the key components that Huawei products needed, such as semiconductors from the Taiwanese chip maker TSMC.

And yet, despite those sanctions, which were unprecedented, I think it's fair to say, in August 2023, Huawei released a new smartphone using a Chinese-made 5G processor. I remember at the time that was seen by the tech world as quite a big moment. Was that hype fair in the sense of Huawei has survived the sanctions or was something else going on there? Because it seems like, at least on the surface...

the sanctions don't seem to have made necessarily a dent in the company. Yeah, I think it reflects that Huawei is too big to fail in China now, or rather, too critical to fail. It makes technologies that no other company really has the similar capability to make in China. And

Especially when China is under these technological sanctions. Now there's an enormous imperative to find ways for Huawei to survive, for it to continue to advance its technologies. And so, yeah, I think that's what that smartphone launch proved, which was that they weren't just going to give up, that they were sanctioned now. They couldn't have access to these chips. They were going to find a way and it worked.

Granted, that technology that they had in their phones was not the very cutting edge as some of Western companies are making, but...

It was good enough. It was still an advanced phone that they had been able to produce, even with some critical supply lines cut off. And I do wonder whether or not that attempted containment of Chinese tech from the American side has actually just spurred on more domestic Chinese tech being used for domestic use and more policy focus and emphasis on China.

I mean, autarky in a way. Yeah, yeah, certainly. And it feels we're on this path now. And I remember at the beginning of the Trump administration, it felt people would talk about decoupling of the

the global tech industry between the United States and China. And it was largely dismissed as something impossible that the world was, we live in a globalized world. Now, you know, everything is interconnected. You can't build two separate ecosystems, but, um,

these things, they become sort of self-fulfilling. Once you start decoupling, it drives a company like Huawei to work harder to indigenize its technologies. So they recently announced that they're shifting totally away from Android this year, that their own operating system that they develop is now very close to mature enough. And granted, that's

still a major blow compared to being in the Android ecosystem for them because that's sort of cut off from the world in a way and in their own little balkanized smartphone ecosystem. But behind that, there is a lot of R&D investment that went into that for them to be able to get to that stage. And throughout all of this, I think it's curious that they've now become...

almost like a patriotic brand to be using and purchasing because in China, lots of people now use Huawei phones rather than Apple phones because Apple is seen as an American brand. Yeah, it did give their brand a big boost in popularity from a patriotic perspective in that I think beforehand, it was kind of more mixed like Apple.

Here in the West, for average people, there have been mixed opinions among the general public of these big tech companies like Huawei. And before, they weren't always that popular, like Huawei had before.

This culture of working employees extremely hard, of not having really good human rights practices for its employees. You know, there were a string of deaths at the company that prompted a lot of outrage among China's public. And so it had this sort of mixed reputation in China before. But I think under the first Trump administration, when the company was established,

put under sanctions, where the founder's daughter was detained in Canada. It really became seen as, you know, patriotic to buy Huawei products and to support them in China.

And Ava, what do you think the future holds for the company then? For now, it seems like it has survived the first Trump presidency, but we're speaking just days before Trump gets inaugurated for the second time. You know, we expect Trump to be very hard on China in his second presidency. But do you think that Huawei will be on the chopping board as before? Or actually, is the threat now moved on to other companies and other areas? Well, I think they're still such a crucial player.

In China's high tech industry, that they'll probably continue to be one of the companies in the policy discussion. Like if you look at areas they're investing now, they're working in artificial intelligence, they're working in autonomous vehicles and advanced robotics, solar, like these kind of industries very much are on demand.

the cutting edge and the subject of policy battles between the two nations right now. And so from that perspective, they will probably continue to be a company of interest for policymakers.

And Ren Zhengfei, you know, he's been so central to the company's success, it seems, but he is in his 80s now. There's almost a parallel here to kind of dictatorships in general as well. You know, what happens when he passes away? Does he have a succession plan? You know, is the company much without him? Yeah, the questions about his succession have been going on for decades, really. And he's played the cards very close to his chest recently.

For most of Huawei's history, he insisted that his children were not going to be his successors. He said this publicly, that they didn't have what it takes and that they would not be his successors. And then after Meng Wanzhou was detained in Canada and released, she came back to

sort of with a new surge of approval among Huawei staff and was promoted soon afterwards to one of the three rotating chair people. So as it currently stands, that's the succession slate, which is two sort of veteran Huawei executives who had started out as engineers and worked their way up the ladder that way. And then Ren's daughter, who was

serves as a continuation of the Ren family presence. But that being said, they have not explicitly said what is going to be the plan after Mr. Ren retires. Fascinating. It'll be interesting to see how this giant of Chinese corporate life continues. Ava Do, thank you so much for joining Chinese Whispers.

Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for listening to this episode of Chinese Whispers. I hope you enjoyed it. If you're listening to this podcast on the Best of the Spectator channel, remember that Chinese Whispers has its own channel as well. If you just search Chinese Whispers, wherever you get your podcasts from, you will always get the latest episode first there.

If you have any feedback, positive or negative, but preferably constructive, please do email me at podcast at spectator.co.uk. And I'd also love it if you left a review or told your family and friends about the podcast. It's the way to help us grow. So thanks so much for listening and join us again next time.