The ambitious and ambiguous rise of Huawei as a telecom giant

The world has been ambiguous about Huawei’s status and can’t quite make up its mind about it. Add to that its vague ownership as a privately held company, and it is understandable why Dou’s book is straightforward and honest, but a little flat. Dou doesn’t dig deep or dazzle with analysis; instead, she lays out the saga of Huawei’s rise with the earnestness of a corporate biographer. What you get is a chronicle of a company and its founder that is equal parts ambition, grit and geopolitical lightning rod. What you don’t get is a bit of scepticism to spice up the narrative.

A CLASSIC UNDERDOG TALE

The case against Huawei, as Dou outlines it, hinges on two planks: its cosy ties to Beijing and whispers of trade-secret theft. But here’s the kicker—American whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks from March 2014 revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had its eyes all over Huawei, snooping through emails and piggybacking on its infrastructure to spy globally. So, while the West wags its finger at Huawei’s supposed sins, the hypocrisy stinks louder than a vomit break during one of Huawei’s infamous crunch-time coding marathons when the company’s programmers worked non-stop on projects, only taking a break to throw up. Meanwhile, the Chinese company started in 1987 by Ren, a former military engineer, was quietly filing more patents annually than anyone else on the planet, a detail Dou notes but doesn’t quite wrestle with.

The book shines when it captures Huawei’s scrappy origins. Picture Ren in 1996, manning a booth with a dinky name tag at the GSM World Congress while Motorola and Siemens schmoozed clients on yachts nearby. It’s a classic underdog tale, but not as celebrated.

Dou portrays Huawei’s intense work ethic (dubbed the “wolf culture") and how it differs from Western corporate environments. Yet, in its early days the company leaned hard on Western know-how, like its first big R&D win with the Mobeco joint venture (a clunky nod to telecom’s holy trinity: Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, and Guglielmo Marconi).

From there, it clawed its way up, fuelled by engineers who worked with a rare passion and executives who braved malaria, frostbite and bullets in far-flung markets. Dou paints this hustle vividly, though she sidesteps taking a position on the murkier bits. Did Huawei help Arab Spring regimes track dissenters? (It probably did.) We get a detailed description of the company’s video products that helped governments keep tabs on their people both in China and countries like Iran, Cuba, Syria and North Korea. It was done in the name of safer cities and at one point was in use in dozens of countries. In the same breath, Dou refers to IBM’s $11 million crime-tracking toy for the New York City police department (NYPD) to imply that the West isn’t exactly spotless either.

The hero of the book, Ren, emerges as a quirky visionary, hiring professors to draft the “Huawei Basic Law", a grand unified theory of running a Chinese company that’s part management playbook, part party loyalty oath. It’s peak Huawei: ambitious, a little weird, and very Chinese. That’s not to minimise the fact that the company has been persistently dogged by scandals. Cisco sued it for router rip-offs and a smear campaign once painted it as a fraud factory. There is also its collaboration with the repressive regime in Xinjiang in setting up the hi-tech surveillance apparatus to spy on the native Uyghur ethnic minority. Dou recounts these sagas with a straight face, but you’re left wondering why she doesn’t push harder on the contradictions.

A DIPLOMATIC CRISIS

The description of the Huawei campus, 350 acres of boulevards, soccer fields and a hotel with prescreened waiters in Dongguan, screams excess tinged with paranoia. It’s a fitting metaphor for a company that’s both global powerhouse and alleged pawn of the all-powerful Chinese Communist Party. Dou doesn’t hide the ties: 20% of Huawei’s workforce are card-carrying members of the party, and its party secretary keeps the red flag flying. Not surprisingly, at some point, Washington started crying “national security" when the Chinese company’s advances threatened to become overwhelming.

In 2007, for instance, news broke that Huawei along with private investment firm Bain Capital was looking to buy US networking company 3Com, which was surviving on sales from its China unit H3C. The US government’s objection to the deal in which Huawei would get a 16.5% stemmed from, hold your breath, the fact that 3Com was a Pentagon contractor, meaning it worked for US security agencies. The deal was killed. It would be repeated in 2010 when the Chinese company dared to bid for a project to expand the 4G network of Sprint, the third largest wireless provider in the US. Once again calls were made by senior administrators expressing concern that Sprint was an important equipment supplier to the US military. Once again, the bid was nixed. The British weren’t much better, tut-tutting even as the country’s MPs happily accepted Huawei-funded junkets.

Dou’s book is at its best when dealing with Ren’s daughter Meng Wanzhou, the woman who would become the centre of a geopolitical battle following her 2018 arrest in Canada at the request of the US on charges related to violating Iran sanctions. Chosen by Ren to replace him as one of the company’s four vice-chairs, Meng became the global face of the company. Her trial, played out against the backdrop of the covid-19 pandemic and the eventual resolution of the crisis through a deferred prosecution agreement in 2021, is recounted with all the trappings of a thriller. Dou explores at length the diplomatic crisis this created between China, Canada and the US, while taking an empathetic look at the impact on Meng, a thoughtful and tough woman who once told a group of students that “the coming days are not endless, and our choices determine our future".

CAPTURING THE HUSTLE

Left unexplained is how the conflict was about both legitimate security concerns of the West and economic competition with Huawei becoming a proxy for larger tensions about technological dominance and different governance models. Strikingly, the saga exposed dependencies in global supply chains that neither side had fully appreciated. Dou’s narrative doesn’t take either the US or Chinese perspective, but shows how differing values, security paradigms and economic interests created an inevitable collision with Huawei at the centre. But she is perceptive and observant, with a journalist’s keen eye. “Wah-way", a peculiar way of pronouncing the company’s name with a silent “h", she tells us, had persisted in the West for inscrutable reasons!

Huawei’s story is ultimately one of brilliance shadowed by suspicion. Dou’s book captures the hustle but lacks the edge to cut through the spin. It’s a solid primer on a company that’s outworked its rivals and outfoxed its critics but still can’t shake the stink of being Beijing’s favourite son. If you want the raw facts of Huawei’s ascent, this’ll do. If you want a scalpel to dissect the mess, look elsewhere.

Sundeep Khanna is a business columnist and author of business books.

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