In 1965, one of Mao Zedong’s most loyal lieutenants, the political theorist Chen Boda, came up with a bold scheme for industrial development in China: centering the electronics industry. Mao seemed interested at first, but some in the Chinese leadership opposed it. Amidst the fervor of the Cultural Revolution that began in the following year, Chen’s idea, backed by supporters in the military, helped ignite a nationwide movement to “demystify electronics.” Like the backyard steel mills during the Great Leap Forward a decade earlier, the attempted great leap in electronics production emphasized self-reliance and mass participation. The People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper, ran a series of articles celebrating workers who built transistors and vacuum tubes with little formal training. A nation that relied on importing technology and emulating others could never shine on its own, read an editorial in the paper under the headline “Shatter the Spiritual Shackles Holding Back Electronics Development.”
The period of revolutionary zeal for electrifying the nation was short-lived. By the early 1970s, as Chen’s faction lost in elite power struggle, opponents denounced his proposal of centering electronics as a form of techno-centrism and foreign worship, which also went against the tenet of placing steel production at the core of industrialization. In his final years, Chen described the failure of this recommendation as “the greatest pain” of his life.
Ren Zhengfei had little say in the debates that embroiled the country at the time. After finishing college with an engineering degree in 1968, the 24-year-old son of school teachers was assigned to a secret military base in the hilly southwest, where he worked as a cook and a plumber before being promoted to technician. Later, his unit was tasked with nylon and polyester manufacturing. Half a century later, the once-humble young man is a household name in his country and one of the world’s most controversial entrepreneurs. Depending on where one stands, the company Ren founded in 1987 is either an exemplar of Chinese ingenuity and pride, or part of Beijing’s sinister plot for world domination. The name of the company is Huawei, and its business is electronics.
Few other companies are as feared, loved, or misunderstood. For those interested in learning about the real Huawei and the people who made it, Eva Dou’s new book, House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company, is an excellent start. A longtime tech reporter and China correspondent, now at the Washington Post, Dou blends archival research and firsthand reporting seamlessly into a page-turning volume. More than the chronology of one company, House of Huawei is partly a family biography of Ren and his eldest daughter Meng Wanzhou, and partly a geopolitical thriller about two superpowers and the people and places caught in between. Composed of 28 brisk chapters in chronological order, starting in the years before Ren’s birth in 1944 and concluding in the present day, the book does an admirable job in foregrounding the human behind the machines and rejecting one-sided caricatures that view Huawei through the lens of U.S.-China rivalry.
As Dou writes in the introduction, “The question of Huawei wasn’t merely a question of business; it was also a question of belief.” To learn more about Huawei is not to simply satiate one’s curiosity about a tech giant; much more importantly, it is to understand the times and forces that have created it, which are also the times we live in and the forces we must contend with. For all its narrative strengths, House of Huawei feels heavy with information but light on insight. It tells a compelling story about one company centered on its founder, but without sufficient historical or social context, the reader is left wondering what lies beyond the story and what kind of lessons might be drawn. The book is at its best when portraying Ren’s ambitions and tracing Huawei’s troubles in the West, but after multiple rereads, I find myself still searching for more to understand what has made Huawei the formidable force it is when other firms have failed, what distinguishes capitalism in China from similar practices in the West, and whether Huawei should be feared because it is Chinese or because it is capitalist.
Huawei was born at a historic juncture. Its formation embodied China’s messy transition from socialist planning to a market economy. Its stunning rise mirrors the country’s ascension in the global capitalist hierarchy. Government policies shaped the company, but its dominance at home and surge abroad were not preordained by the Chinese state. That a telecommunications firm seeking to network the nation and wire the world would find itself entangled in the webs of nationalism and geopolitics, facing faultlines no technology could bridge, reads like a fable for our times. Huawei’s success was not inevitable, nor are the tensions that jeopardize its future. To answer the questions about Huawei—what kind of company it is, who controls it, and where it might be headed—one must look beyond the firm itself and reexamine the past four decades of China’s development, the choices made and the paths not taken, and ask: are tools of the information age a force for freedom, or have they formed new shackles, captivating our moral and political imagination?
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In 1982, as a new generation of Chinese leaders under Deng Xiaoping shifted their focus from national defense to economic development, the army Engineering Corps that Ren had been a part of was decommissioned. Nearing forty, Ren found himself in Shenzhen on the southern coast, assigned to work at a state-owned oil company. Designated as one of the country’s first Special Economic Zones, Shenzhen was meant to be “a buffer zone between China and the rest of the world,” as Dou puts it, absorbing capital and technology from neighboring Hong Kong while containing capitalism’s spiritual pollution.
The coastal city became a laboratory for China’s capitalist transition. In 1987, having floundered out of his job at the oil company, Ren founded Huawei Technologies Co. under Shenzhen’s new pilot program for private tech startups. As he would later recount, Ren chose telecommunications “out of naivete”: the country’s scant phone coverage indicated rich business potential, but Ren had not anticipated the regulatory hurdles or intense competition.
Telecommunications was one of the first sectors in China to open to foreign investment. Shanghai Bell, established by the Belgian-based Bell Telephone Manufacturing Company and a Chinese state-owned factory, became one of the country’s first joint ventures with an overseas partner. Importing equipment and designs and absorbing them into domestic production was no longer deemed reactionary. On the contrary, Chinese authorities in the reform era promoted learning from the West as the more efficient path to modernization and implemented favorable policies, such as lower tax rates, to attract foreign capital.
For many Western companies, trading part of their technology for market access in China was good business, so long as they kept the most cutting-edge knowledge to themselves. They wanted to cultivate customers, not competitors, from China. Ren recognized the limitations of relying on technology transfer. “In the end, you are not self-sufficient,” Dou quotes him in the book. Huawei did not have foreign investors or formal state backing. Nor did it have its own products at first. Instead, the startup assembled and sold devices on contract for others. The lackluster approach provided a stable profit margin. When Ren decided to gamble the firm’s future by investing heavily in designing Huawei’s own telephone switch, the risky move caused a major split at the company. Several of Huawei’s initial investors left.
Ren was not alone in his desire for a homegrown switch. Up north in the inland province of Henan, a young army engineer named Wu Jiangxing was steps ahead in the effort.
In December 1991, China’s Ministry of Posts and Communications announced the creation of the 04 switch by the Wu team. The first Chinese-designed program-controlled phone switch was not only a technological milestone: its invention also lowered the cost of telecom equipment in China and served as a much-needed morale boost to the nascent industry in the country.
Dou points out that “The breakthrough was perhaps not solely due to domestic innovation,” and the Wu team might have had access to the source code of a foreign switch. Framing the detail this way without further contextualization risks feeding into the orientalist trope that the West innovates while the East merely copies. As a matter of fact, every technological advancement is built upon what has come before. Insistence on self-reliance without any external help might be good propaganda in revolutionary times, but knowledge has been smuggled against the most stringent embargoes, and emulation is a necessary first step to invention. When the Wu team was working on the 04 switch, Cold-War-era export controls had blocked Chinese access to more advanced chips from abroad. In an episode of resourcefulness against restrictions that carries much resonance today, Wu’s team scavenged Shenzhen’s second-hand market for used electronics that had slipped across the border from Hong Kong and came up with a distributed computing architecture that could make the necessary calculations with lower-end chips.
The public tends to see innovation as an event, a stroke of genius across a blank slate that takes place at the center, and not as a process consisting of incremental steps, which often begin in the margins. The skewed lens is also reflected in how tech firms are perceived. Often, attention fixates on the founder, while the broader social, political, and historical contexts that enable entrepreneurship and shape the business are relegated to an afterthought. Ren’s military past has been the source of much speculation in the West; in Dou’s words, it’s his “original sin” according to Huawei’s detractors, who question the company’s ties to the Chinese state. Ren’s ties to his ex-father-in-law, who served as the vice-governor of Sichuan province, have also been raised to cast doubt on Huawei’s private ownership.
Dou is careful to rightsize these elements of Ren’s background: a certain amount of political patronage was necessary for a business to survive in China, and Ren’s connections were not so remarkable, especially when compared with some of Huawei’s competitors. Yet, I wish Dou had devoted more space to describing industrial policy and the overall business environment in the first decades of market reform. A reader is left with a much more vivid image of Ren’s life before Huawei than that of Huawei’s main competitors, while the latter would arguably shed more light on the kind of company Huawei has become. At the time, China’s fledgling telecom market was dominated by joint ventures like Shanghai Bell and other state-owned businesses. Reductions in defense spending, which had led to the disbanding of Ren’s army engineering corps, also incentivized military researchers like Wu to work on dual-use technology with commercial prospects. In 1995, Wu helped set up Great Dragon Telecommunications. The 04 switch was its main product. Once a formidable rival to Huawei, the state-owned enterprise succumbed to poor management and technology diffusion. Members of the Wu team saw themselves first and foremost as researchers solving a technical problem for the benefit of the country, not as businesspeople trying to capitalize on their invention. Before Great Dragon was established, the design of the 04 switch had been widely shared, partly through the military network. Wu himself also lectured at Huawei, taking only a few hundred dollars as an honorarium.
Three years after the founding of Great Dragon, a new policy prohibited military personnel from engaging in commercial activity, and Wu’s cohort of army engineers left the firm. Great Dragon failed not long after. 1998 was also a pivotal year for Huawei. As the company entered its second decade, beating the odds in a mercurial market, Ren wanted to review the lessons for its success and formalize Huawei’s mission, management methods, and ownership structure. He turned to a group of professors at Renmin University in Beijing. After a three-year effort and multiple revisions, a sixteen-thousand word document was codified in March of 1998. It’s called the Huawei Basic Law.
As Dou notes, the name “Basic Law” echoed that of Hong Kong’s “mini-constitution.” Huawei’s equipment had played a role in televising the handover ceremony the year before, when the former British colony returned to Chinese rule. According to its drafters, the Huawei Basic Law also paid homage to another enterprise law from China’s socialist past, the Angang Constitution, which I wish Dou had brought up in the book. Seated in the northeastern borderland of Manchuria, Anshan Iron and Steelworks, or Angang for short, was one of the most important industrial plants of the Mao era, when steel production was regarded as the backbone of the nation. Issued in 1960 by the communist party committee of Anshan City, the Angang Constitution called for cadres to participate in labor, for workers to take part in management, and for innovation to be incorporated into the production process. Stamped with Mao’s approval, the document was a major propaganda tool during the Cultural Revolution. It faded from the limelight in the reform era, remembered mostly as a relic from a failed experiment.
As historian Koji Hirata explains in his book, Making Mao’s Steelworks, the Angang Constitution “epitomized the dawn of a new phase of Chinese socialism,” as the country explored a different path of socialist industrialization distinct from the Soviet model. Four decades later, the Huawei Basic Law represented capitalism with Chinese characteristics. Dou points out that Huawei was not “a Western-style, publicly listed company.” Its primary goal, as stated in the Basic Law, was not to maximize profits in the short term, but to achieve longevity and become a world leader in the industry. Huawei’s unorthodox ownership structure, where employees held non-voting shares through a trade union, grew out of its humble beginnings and China’s elastic regulatory environment in the early days of marketization. Unable to pay its employees in full, the young company converted the wages it had owed into stock options. The ingenious financing method would probably be illegal today.
Owning company shares did not give Huawei employees ownership of their workplace. The stock option became another tool of corporate control, binding workers’ personal finances to the interest of the firm. Unlike the Angang Constitution, which sought to diminish class differences and empower the masses, the Huawei Basic Law is unabashedly capitalist and hierarchical. At Huawei, not all labor is deemed equal: knowledge production is seen as the most advanced form of labor, and knowledge as the most valuable type of capital. Workers are expected to be loyal to the firm and fuse their self-worth with the firm’s success. The firm, on the other hand, considers its labor force as disposable and replaceable. No matter one’s seniority or existing contributions, continued employment is never guaranteed at Huawei.
Huawei’s Basic Law was the first corporate legislation of its kind in China. The People’s Daily praised the pathbreaking endeavor. A book was published on the birth of the law and its main themes. It’s titled Out of Chaos. Ren wrote the preface. He opened with a quote from Mao, containing a Marxist adage: “The history of humankind is a history of continuous development from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.”
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Like many Chinese people of his generation, Ren is well-versed in the words of Mao. The Huawei boss has reinterpreted the communist revolutionary’s teachings through a unique capitalist lens: the “realm of freedom” is not where the pressure for material production ceases but where corporate efficiency soars. Mao famously said that political power comes from the barrel of a gun, and Ren took it to mean that a company must manage to sell its products.
Huawei’s initial road to success paralleled that of the Chinese Communist Party: both began by establishing a foothold in the rural regions before striking out to seize the cities. The company adopted a similar strategy for its overseas expansion. In a market dominated by Western titans, Huawei targeted what Dou calls “rogue regimes”: developing countries with lax regulations and a fledgling telecom infrastructure, whose governments are often suspicious of the West and are more amenable to Chinese products, especially when they’re offered at a lower price.
As Dou notes, Huawei’s first major international event was in 1996, when China’s National Science and Technology Commission arranged for Ren to visit Russia. Taiwan held its first free presidential election that year, and U.S.-China relations were in a rough spot. Beijing sought closer ties with Moscow, and Ren saw a business opportunity. The Russian capital became home to Huawei’s first overseas branch. A second office opened in Brazil a year later.
Liang Guoshi served as Ren’s interpreter during the 1996 trip and stayed in Russia to run the Moscow office. In his 2004 memoir, The “Native Wolf” Breaks the Siege, Liang recalls Huawei’s early years abroad. At first, the company tried to follow Beijing’s lead, but relying on official diplomacy soon proved to be a restrictive business strategy. The firm and the state had diverging interests and priorities. In what has become corporate lore, Huawei made zero sales during its first three years in Russia; when a purchase order finally arrived in 1999, it totaled only 38 dollars.
Against a crowded domestic market, venturing overseas was deemed necessary for Huawei’s long-term survival, but the fierce competition at home also followed the firms abroad. According to Liang, Beijing put Great Dragon in charge of its telecom project in Cuba, and Huawei had to partner with the state-backed competitor in order to access the foreign aid funds. Sometimes, Huawei’s overseas staff chose to limit their interactions with the Chinese embassies to prevent commercial secrets from leaking to rivals.
In her pathbreaking 2017 volume, The Specter of Global China, sociologist Ching Kwan Lee examines how Chinese state capital operates in Africa in two distinct industries, mining and construction, and where parallels and divergences with Western private capital emerge. Similar questions can be raised about Huawei, especially in the years following Liang’s memoir, when the private Chinese firm in a strategically important sector had established its leading position at home but was still striving to make a name for itself abroad. Did the company align itself more closely with Beijing’s geopolitical initiatives, what assistance or general direction did it receive from the Chinese state, and how might Huawei’s record compare with its Western counterparts, when the spread of modern information technologies had followed the routes of capital and colonial expansion? A book that interrogates these dimensions remains to be written.
To many at Huawei and industry observers, the firm’s accomplishments in and out of China were a testament to the power of self-reliance and its signature “wolf culture.” Ren described “wolf instinct” as a sharp sense of smell, fearless aggression, and the ability to fight as a team. At the company’s annual training sessions, everyone gathered to sing patriotic songs. The repertoire included Chinese classics like “An Ode to the Motherland,” as well as the company’s original “Huawei Marches Abroad.” The lyrics of the latter, which Liang cites in his memoir, were adapted from the anthem for Chinese soldiers in the Korean War. Instances of the “Yalu River” that demarcated Manchuria from the Korean Peninsula were replaced by the “Pacific Ocean.” So the Huawei version goes: “The spirit is high. The heart is mighty. To cross the Pacific Ocean!/Go to Europe, go to the Americas, fight in Africa! …”
In 2000, at the send-off ceremony for a new class of Huawei’s overseas warriors, a giant banner read: “Loyal bones can be buried anywhere in the green mountains. Who needs to return home wrapped in the hide of his battle horse?” The language might seem over the top for a company that sells phones and switches, but it’s not an exaggeration to say the House of Huawei has been built on blood, sweat, and tears. As Dou details in the book, the company sees conflicts and natural disasters as business opportunities, where telecommunications must be maintained or restored, and does not hesitate to send its workers to the frontlines. Even those with desk jobs suffer from long hours and high pressure. For years, Huawei boasted a “mattress culture,” where staff pulled all-nighters in the office. The firm toned down its rhetoric after a string of employee deaths from suicide or sudden illness sparked public outcry.
Huawei was still in the thick of the suicides scandal when another labor controversy erupted, Dou writes. Before China’s 2008 Labor Contract Law could take effect and offer protection to workers who had been with the same company for over a decade, over 6,000 Huawei employees, as well as Ren himself, formally resigned and swiftly rejoined the firm, resetting their clocks. While Huawei took pride in a youthful workforce as indicative of its innovative spirit, the company was known for laying off older engineers to keep the wages low.
The rising empire reaped its riches. In 2005, British Telecom (BT) picked Huawei for its network upgrade, and the Chinese firm’s overseas revenue surpassed its domestic sales for the first time. As Dou puts it, the BT decision “broke open the dam into the West” for Huawei, and marked “the beginning of the end” for several of its Western rivals. A decade later, Huawei was one of the “Big Four” in global telecom, alongside its Chinese opponent ZTE and the European giants Nokia and Ericsson.
No amount of gains could assuage Ren’s sense of foreboding. Back in 2000, after a particularly lucrative year, Ren penned a now-iconic essay, “The Winter of Huawei.” He cautioned that even in the splendor of summer, one must prepare for freezing weather ahead. Years later, Western journalists arrived at Huawei’s new R&D campus in Dongguan to a sight of eclectic opulence that “would have put Jay Gatsby himself to shame,” Dou writes. An imitation of the Palace of Versailles looked over that of the Heidelberg Castle. In the grand European-style hall where Ren greeted reporters, a mural of the Battle of Waterloo stood next to a portrait of Napoleon at his coronation. Outside, black swans glided across the pond.
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The foreign press was invited to visit Huawei in 2019 as the company faced its most daunting adversary: the U.S. government. For years, U.S. officials had been sounding the alarm on the vulnerabilities of Chinese telecom equipment and blocked Huawei from acquiring American businesses on national security grounds. As U.S.-China tensions escalated during the first Trump administration, federal agencies were prohibited from purchasing Huawei or ZTE devices, and Washington tried to convince its allies to exclude the Chinese companies from their countries’ 5G networks.
The security concerns were not unfounded. As Dou notes, when Chinese premier Li Peng visited Huawei in 1996, he asked Ren whether the firm’s technology could be used to track calls from criminals. According to Liang’s memoir, Russian intelligence also demanded wiretapping capabilities with Huawei’s switches. Yet, assisting state surveillance is not simply about compliance: it is a thriving business. By the mid-2010s, “Huawei was hawking a fulsome portfolio of advanced surveillance technologies, built in cooperation with hundreds of startups and other partner companies,” Dou writes. The products included police cameras (equipped with chips from Huawei’s semiconductor subsidiary, HiSilicon), a voiceprint database, and biometric scanners. As the Chinese government intensified its ethnic oppression in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, and an estimated one million or more Uyghurs disappeared into the camps, Huawei and a partner company, Megvii, developed a facial recognition system that targeted the Turkic minority. In leaked internal documents, the feature was called “Uyghur alarm.” Never to miss an opportunity to make a sale, Huawei also marketed its surveillance technologies abroad, including to the Middle East during the Arab Spring protests.
The question, then, is not whether Huawei is innocent, but whether the Chinese firm is uniquely guilty. To assume the latter, as proponents of banning Huawei appear to claim, is to overlook the long history of Western tech firms collaborating with and profiting from state oppression. As Dou points out, IBM designed profiling systems for the Nazis. Cisco’s equipment supplied the Great Firewall in China. In 2014, classified documents disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. spy agency had infiltrated Huawei years ago. The NSA did not just gain access to Huawei’s internal emails and source codes; it was also using the company’s global telecom network to surveil and possibly sabotage other targets. As politicians and pundits in the U.S. expounded on how Beijing might weaponize Huawei’s infrastructure, the allegations were more than Cold-War paranoia or theoretical projections. They reflected capabilities Washington already possessed and wished to monopolize.
In May 2019, President Trump declared a national emergency over “foreign adversaries” who are “increasingly creating and exploiting vulnerabilities in information and communications technologies and services.” The next day, the Commerce Department placed Huawei on its entity list, subjecting the firm to stringent export controls. Across the border in Canada, Ren’s eldest daughter Meng Wanzhou was under house arrest while her legal team fought against her extradition to the U.S., where she had been accused of defrauding a bank to do business in Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions.
To the people of Huawei, Washington’s stated aims of safeguarding critical infrastructure and protecting human rights were little more than self-righteous rhetoric to mask its true objective: to cripple the company and contain China’s rise. Targeting the chairman’s daughter was an act of desperation by an unscrupulous bully.
Huawei’s executives turned to history for guidance. In an interview with veteran tech reporter Yasuhiko Ota, which Ota recounts in his book The Geopolitics of Semiconductors, the head of Huawei’s Japanese branch Wang Jianfeng said the staff had studied the trade war between the United States and Japan in the 1980s. At the urging of the domestic semiconductor industry, Washington accused Japanese firms of flooding the U.S. market with cheap chips, and forced Tokyo into a series of concessions. The 1986 U.S.-Japan Semiconductor Agreement demanded Japan fill one fifth of its market with foreign chips, while restricting its exports to the U.S. On the steps of the U.S. Capitol, a group of Congresspeople smashed a Toshiba radio, ostensibly protesting the Japanese firm’s sale of sensitive technology to the Soviets.
“Japan is a U.S. ally, and it still faced such harsh treatment. Obviously, we must abandon any unrealistic wishes,” Wang told Ota. At Huawei, hostilities from the U.S. reinvigorated the staff. Mao-era calls for self-reliance gained fresh urgency in a new round of great power rivalry.
A year later, as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the globe, Washington tightened its sanctions against Huawei, effectively cutting off the company’s access to advanced semiconductors from abroad. In response, the firm’s Weibo account shared a photo. A favorite of Ren’s, it depicts a Soviet fighter jet from WWII. Despite enduring heavy enemy fire, it kept on flying. The post went viral. Its caption reads: “We have no other paths but to victory.”
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In 1999, during the NATO operation in the former Yugoslavia, five missiles from a U.S. bomber struck the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Washington said it was an accident, but the Chinese public was not convinced. Protests erupted across the country condemning U.S. imperialism. Some Huawei employees joined the demonstration in Shenzhen. The company offered financial assistance to the families of the victims. As Dou recounts in the book, Ren told the staff that the tragedy was proof “the American empire’s desire for the downfall of our nation always lingers.”
Weeks before the missiles fell, Zhu Rongji, who had succeeded Li Peng as premier, visited the U.S. seeking support for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). Zhu was ready to make a list of concessions, but the Americans were unsatisfied. After two decades of reform and opening-up, many in China saw the embassy bombing as a crude wake-up call, exposing the injustices in a global order their country had been trying so hard to be a part of.
A quarter of a century later, the Middle Kingdom has progressed from the periphery to the core of global capitalism. As U.S. sanctions fuel another wave of anti-American sentiment in China, Huawei is the new national symbol under enemy fire. In the eyes of Chinese patriots, rallying around Huawei is not about protecting private capital: it is defending sovereignty and national pride. “Huawei is fighting for us,” reads a popular essay from 2020. “If one day, Huawei also fell, who can still fight for us?”
The battle, according to the author, is a tech war between China and the U.S. Yet, what does winning look like, and how might it affect the Chinese people if Huawei—or “China”—emerges on top?
This February, when another round of trade war began under the second Trump administration, Xi Jinping convened a symposium with China’s leading private entrepreneurs. A similar gathering was held in 2018, during Trump’s last trade war with China. Ren was not present at the 2018 meeting. This time, he was the first to speak after Xi.
During Huawei’s media blitz in 2019, Ren famously argued against nationalism as “bad for the country.” China’s future lies in “opening up,” Ren told the Chinese press, and Huawei is only a commercial firm: using its products should not be interpreted as an act of patriotism. A little over a year later, Beijing began cracking down on private enterprise, outlawing certain sectors and slapping tougher regulations on others. A few tycoons were detained. As the country struggles amid a sluggish economy and geopolitical headwinds in 2025, Xi has once again summoned China’s top businessmen. The gesture of reconciliation was also a display of power. Portraying itself as a global firm with a cosmopolitan outlook may be a clever PR strategy for Huawei to win Western clients, but if there is one thing Beijing and Washington can agree on, it is that Chinese companies must answer to the Chinese Communist Party.
Speculating on Ren’s actual beliefs—whether he is a communist or capitalist, nationalist or globalist—misses the point. The soldier-entrepreneur, like the company he has created and the country that made him, embodies all of these elements and carries many contradictions. If there is one core ideology, for Ren and for Huawei, it is that survival comes first.
Dou points out that “Huawei’s rise had been a Sputnik moment.” It defied conventional wisdom about innovation and trade, the market and the state. The rise of a corporate titan like Huawei “was not supposed to be possible through Communism,” Dou writes, and many have started questioning whether “the source of innovation really was college dropouts’ garages and not the state picking winners and losers.” Yet, Huawei did not rise through communism, nor was its success preordained by the state. No matter the myth Silicon Valley likes to tell about itself, the tech capital did not grow out of college dropouts’ garages. It was built upon military contracts; government-funded research; and trade, labor, and immigration policies that disproportionately favor U.S. businesses to the deprivation of the rest of the world.
“In the new century, liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem,” declared President Bill Clinton in the spring of 2000, as Dou quotes in the book. A year after Zhu’s visit and ten months after the Belgrade bombing, the U.S. president finally announced his support for China to join the WTO. Two and a half decades into the new century, the spread of cellphones and the internet has brought many modern conveniences; it has also furthered state surveillance and corporate control of private lives. Huawei is but one culprit among many. U.S. authorities rail against China for breaking the rules of global trade to protect domestic industry, while the rules were designed to secure U.S. hegemony in the first place. Having long jettisoned its socialist revolutionary past, China has not so much changed the game of global capitalism as proven that a country ruled by a nominally communist party can also have a seat at the table and call the shots.
“After decades of believing that the end of history had arrived with free markets and democracy, people came to the realization that history hadn’t, in fact, ended,” Dou writes in the final chapter of the book. Neoliberalism has conjured up a global village, where the unfettered flow of capital and commerce can transcend national borders. Ren might have also aspired to that vision. But capitalism requires a hierarchy, and the world has never been flat. As a New Cold War looms between the United States and China—many say it is already here—the future, as Dou writes, is starting to look like the past.
But a part of history did end with the conclusion of the Cold War, when the triumph of market capitalism closed off the political imagination. The choice should never have been between Huawei and Cisco or China and the U.S. The false dichotomy of techno-nationalism obscures a shared experience of extraction and exploitation. No one is more cognizant than Ren of the fact that one day the House of Huawei will fall. It is only a tragedy for those who cannot conceive of an alternative: not a similar entity with a new name, but a different way to organize society and utilize information. Tools of communication do not have to be technologies of capture. Their liberatory potential is not commanded from the center but lies in experimenting at the margins. Every transistor and every wire holds the promise of an escape hatch, signaling toward an alternative world, where the factory belongs to the workers and knowledge stays in the commons, where our spaces of existence and channels of speaking are not stamped with a corporate logo or claimed by a national flag.