Nothing to see here: Eva Dou's "House of Huawei"
An intriguing look at China's greatest tech company, and what we still don't know.
Trying to get to the facts about Huawei is like wrestling a slippery eel. Eva Dou, a Washington Post reporter, gives it a shot in her book, House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company. While she doesn’t unveil secrets, she does help us understand that there are a lot of them, and not just within Huawei.
The focus on the mysteries of the company and its founder, Ren Zhengfei, fits an American obsession with determining whether Huawei is controlled by the Communist Party of China. Anyone reading a decent newspaper over the years will have come across a lot of the information in this book, at least enough to have an idea that’s similar to whatever we are supposed to glean from House of Huawei.
In other words, the book comes off as an outsider’s well-reported but limited view into the company, its ownership, its capabilities, and its intent. Dou’s accomplishment is to have compiled what is in the public domain, with some additional reporting – particularly by accessing some of Huawei’s internal documents – that provides a balanced and fair narrative.
She is scrupulously professional, dropping well-sourced grenades here and there, and studiously neutral on a politically explosive subject. But for all of that, or perhaps because this is her approach, Dou keeps her imagination firmly in check. The book is not one for insights or lessons, but just a faithful retelling of what can be pieced together.
Any reporter will face constraints on what they can learn about an institution that is deliberately vague about even seemingly harmless or routine details. A leak or whistleblower is usually required to pry open a window into a situation. There is however no Edward Snowden or Deep Throat willing or able to expose Huawei.
Thus, the book’s subtitle about secret histories is a little misleading, in that we don’t get to the bottom of anything. Attempting to dish the dirt makes for book sales but it also leads us away from what could be different but also illuminating questions. I’ll get to that later.
Ren came of age in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, in Sichuan, where he benefited from an early marriage to a woman whose father was the vice governor of the province and an ally of Deng Xiaoping. Ren is a self-made man, but such political cover was necessary to jumpstarting Huawei, even after Ren and his first wife, Meng Jun, divorced. Meng Jun is important because it’s an early example of a persistent habit at Huawei of covering up personal details, and because she gave birth to Ren’s daughter Meng Wanzhou, who would later take a starring role in the Huawei story.
Ren is an engineer, the son of a high-school principal. While working for the PLA Engineering Corpos, he invented a precision air-pressure generator in 1977, at a time when the government was encouraging such innovation. That feat won him admission to the Communist Party a year later, and for the next several years Ren participated in several high-profile Party conferences. He left the military when Deng began kicking the PLA out of commercial businesses, and briefly worked for a state-owned enterprise.
Soon he’d be founding his own company, in Shenzhen, a new city experimenting with free enterprise, in 1987. Huawei was co-founded with five other backers, whose identities remained a secret for many years (and remain murky today). Whatever the backing, the company was Ren’s – maybe. There was actually a different chairman, a fact omitted in the company’s telling. Ties to state-owned groups were also shrouded. All of these occlusions would haunt Ren later on, but China’s rambunctious business landscape was never legalistic nor cut and dry, so the veils were probably about survival in that environment rather than a strategic effort to hoodwink foreigners.
Huawei assembled telephone switches for others, including a Hong Kong company, but Ren wanted to build his own switches, designed for Chinese scale. For years he dueled with the other shareholders over this but by 1993 Huawei designed digital (not analog) switches that could handle ten thousand calls at once. Instead of selling services to companies, he could sell to cities. It would, however, be a state-owned rival, ZTE, that first made purely domestic-made switches.
Around this time the company’s shareholders also changed its structure, from a recognizable private company to a “collectively owned enterprise”, a blur between free and state-owned, in which, in theory, the workers own it together and are supposed to reap the financial rewards according to their input. This appealed to political patrons at a time when Huawei was pitching to various municipal governments. But it also enabled plenty of obfuscation around corporate governance.
Nonetheless Huawei told people it was a private company, in contrast to ZTE (although ZTE also had a publicly listed arm, which ironically required far more disclosures than ‘private’ Huawei did). This made it possible for Huawei to continue to purchase vital components from US companies, even as Ren was maneuvering to build a purely domestic telecom infrastructure, which he cast in national-security terms.
Huawei did eventually create such products, although they looked to be copies of AT&T technology. It also expanded into chip design and its own venture-capital arm, while enjoying preferential funding from state-owned banks. Later it would become a world leader in smartphones, behind only Apple and Samsung. And it would become a master of AI, but AI used for a police state, with camera networks, facial recognition, and insidious tools for racial profiling. Its new chairwoman, Sun Yafang, came from the Ministry of State Security, the intelligence agency, and she set up Party cells within the company.
There’s no need to repeat the rest of the account about Huawei, as this sums up the essentials. The company kept secret is personnel, and its personalities. It had links to the government and the Party. Ren was a fiery nationalist. In the turbulent era of “opening and reform”, he played rough. It was hardly unique for a Chinese enterprise to cut corners; steal foreigners’ secrets; be enmeshed in strange dealings with politicians, regulators, and Party operatives; treat all information, even anodyne records, as a corporate secret; and operate a business that purported to democratically represent its laborers while shielding decision-making and accountability behind pantomime committees.
Dou makes the point that Huawei’s corporate structure is a creature of its environment: it replicates the opaque decision-making process of the Communist Party. Does this make it a creature of the CCP?
This is the burning question – in Washington, DC. In reality, I’m not sure it matters. What if Huawei were incorporated like a US public company such as Boeing or Cisco? The US National Security Agency forced companies like Cisco to let the NSA insert spyware in its telecom switches, and then not tell anyone. There may be more daylight separating Cisco and the NSA than there is between Huawei and Beijing, but it’s just a question of degree. A pugilistic guy like Ren didn’t need to be told to go international first in countries like Iran and North Korea; he did this on his own, because that’s where he could go.
Dou evaluates waves of US reaction to Huawei, including the Trump administration’s controversial decision to detain Ren’s daughter, Meng Wanzhou, during a stopover in Vancouver. The roots of this action go back two decades. The US began to take Huawei seriously in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York: the fiber optic cables in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran were laid by Huawei, often ignoring and evading US sanctions.
The Bush administration’s focus on terrorism gave Huawei a reprieve. The Bush team worked on improving relations with China, which it saw as a stakeholder in upholding global order. US businesses such as IBM had been enthusiastic about selling services to Huawei, even as they began to worry about looming competition, from what would become known in the West as the China Shock. Huawei made huge inroads into Europe, the UK, and Canada, as well as emerging markets.
British intelligence experts determined that Huawei hardware could be managed safely; other countries, such as Kenya and Malaysia, shrugged at the inevitability of data flowing to Beijing. US officials did have grounds for alarm about Huawei’s tech for surveillance. Indeed, they seemed to know quite a lot about Huawei capabilities. Snowden’s cache revealed why: the NSA had already been conducting all the digital espionage activities that Washington accused Huawei of doing.
But such information didn’t clear up questions in Washington about Huawei’s character or intentions. Now it had to be blunted, and it was Donald Trump’s mandate to halt China’s rise. He was ruthless – until he wasn’t.
In typical Trump style, he bungled it, raising five-alarm fires about Huawei, imposing sanctions on equipping it, and then turning it into a personal brawl by arresting Meng. This affront to Huawei and Ren Zhengfei inevitably became a high-profile case of hurt national pride. It’s pretty clear that Meng had helped Huawei evade US sanctions and do business in Iran, with the help of HSBC, but Trump’s actions turned her into a martyr. Her lawyers began poking technical holes in the US and Canadian case. China seized two Canadian nationals as hostage pieces. What a mess. One of the Biden administration’s first actions was to release Meng, although he continued Trump’s sanctions on the company.
The affair had one positive side effect. For a while, Huawei underwent a charm offensive, and Ren for the first time allowed media interviews, including with foreign reporters. He showed off Huawei’s fabulist Dongguan headquarters, fashioned like European castles. Indeed, Ren has an aesthetic streak. He was happy to pour money into flashy or luxurious campuses in order to impress people. He encouraged his staff to get cultured, through arts, literature, and music. Even Huawei data centers – generally vast monotonous blocks of computer warehouses far from sight – are embellished with faux-European architecture. Without this brief window, the outside world might have never learned anything about Ren.
Dou’s account ably compiles the known narrative of the company, even if she can’t penetrate into the people themselves. Ren and Meng are public figures. Everyone else remains just names on text, their personalities and personal thoughts unknown. Even so, I came off sympathetic to Ren. He’s not a nice guy, but he’s a patriot, a man of grit, and a builder. He is building for China, in an era when China has become the global leader of making big things happen. He’s the shaper of modern China as well as its product.
Is he guilty of the accusations made in Washington? Hell yeah. And for a long time he tried to obscure much about the company and its activities, which include building the tools to enable the mass incarceration of Uighers and the dystopian surveillance that underpinned the zero-Covid policy.
But it’s become obvious what Huawei does, good and bad, just as it’s pretty clear what Cisco or Google are to the US government. I preferred the world where rivalry could exist alongside cooperation. If we’re doomed to just be adversaries, then, OK, Huawei is a threat to US interests. But is the US capable of responding by upping its own game, or is it just going to try to strangle Huawei with chip bans and so on?
Dou concludes that these sanctions are indeed sapping the life out of the company. Let’s say the US gets its way and Huawei becomes a shadow of itself. Then what? Who’s got the capacity to master the next generation of telecom infrastructure? Where’s the institutional know-how living today? Huawei’s ability to survive on hastily engineered domestic semiconductors suggests these capabilities are not just about one company.
The best thing I think the US could have done, perhaps in the Biden interregnum, is to have taken a page from China and get Huawei to invest in America. Forgive it its sins, put on some guardrails, and let it in. But in return, it must provide technology transfer. Just like China’s forced many multinationals to do when they come onshore.
The US hasn’t taken this approach – with Huawei, or any other Chinese company – because it thinks it has the best tech. Anyway, under Trump, such an approach is off the table. But there’s a lot to be learned from Huawei, starting with chips.
This is where I feel Dou’s book could have shined a light, even in the absence of the kind of access she needed to penetrate its governance and other secrets. She talks about business arrangements that won contracts. But she doesn’t mention what kind of state subsidies or support Huawei won: land, electricity, worker management, access to ports. Nor does she have much to say about how the company builds products, or details about the way it used IBM or other partners to teach itself how to improve. These details are boring, if your mission is to unveil CCP links and MSS agendas. But they’re crucial if US policymakers are to get to grips with how Huawei became a powerhouse in so many critical technologies and services, and how it continues to survive Washington’s regulatory onslaught. Because America’s going to have to relearn this stuff, one switch at a time.
Eva Dou, “House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company”, Portfolio/Penguin: New York, 2025.