The truth about Huawei | Spy in Disguise; The Chinese telecoms firm was first to raise America's heckles. Economist, Jan 25, 2025, at page 72. https://www.economist.com/cultur ... -huawei-led-the-way
(book review on Eva Dou 窦伊文, House of Huawei; The secret history of China's most powerful company. Portfolio (a division of Penguin Random House), Jan 14, 2025)
Quote (after paragraph 1):
" * * * And yet, Huawe, a Chinese tech group, continues to thrive. In 2023 its revenues were around $100bn, nearly twice as much as those of Intel, an iconic Silicon Valley firm.
"For decades journalists and researchers have tried to prove [in vain] that Huawei is a state-owned and Mr Ren [Zhengffei] is a high-ranking military officer. Ms Dou explains how Mr Ren's time in the army was actually largely spent doing low-level jobs, sometimes in a factory in a cave; he was not, as many in the West believed, a signals-intelligence officer. Huawei's early shareholding records are convoluted.
"Some of this [accusation] strikes at the heart of the West's misunderstanding about how China works. In the 1980s, China's economy was dominated by the state; doing business with purely private entrepreneurs would have made Huawei an oddity. * * *
"Huawei's collaboration with the state may tarnish its reputation outside China, but it has been a valuable part of its business. * * * Today Huawei is at the forefront of helping the government accomplish that goal ['Chinese self-sufficiency in technology']. In 2023 the group managed to produce its own high-powered chips for smartphones, three years after Mr Trump banned it from buying American ones. This allowed Huawei to relaunch its smartphone business. It has also been one of the main suppliers of surveillance technology used to watch over Uyghurs * * * It once designed a 'Uyghur alarm' [维吾尔警报] for a facial-recognition programme.
"Ms Dou points out that Huawei first irked American snoops in the mid-1990s when it began expanding its fibre-optic cables overseas. At that point America's National Security Agency' found itself shut out from many of the conversations it would have liked to hear.' * * *
"Has America's fear of Huawei -- and of others such as TikTok -- been overwrought? Revelations about the biggest Chinese hacking incident ever cast Huawei and TikTok in a slightly different light. Late last year, it was revealed that Chinese spy agencies had gained access to large amounts of photo data from top American officials and could listen in on private conversations. American telcos have been ripping ripping out and replacing Huawei gears for years. * * * Kicking Huawei out has been a political win for many in Washington. It has not, however, stopped the Communist Party from Listening in.”
Note: In Table of Contents, the summary for this article is: How Huawei won.