There are no supreme saviors
We want neither gods nor emperors
To build a new life
We must only rely on ourselves.

—“L’Internationale

On September 9, 1976 the fate of two men would change forever, and with it the fate of a nation. When Mao Zedong died, “in his 83rd year”, as the state-owned radio announced a full 16 hours after the death of the general secretary of the Communist party of China (CPC), Ren Zhengfei (80) and Xi Jinping (71) would not have known just how much the tide had turned in their favour. Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), a brutal churning of Chinese society in search of the ideologically pure “revolutionary”, made class enemies of everyone, and tore apart families. The Red Guards, groups of paramilitary youth given a free hand to persecute and execute any one suspect of elite inclinations, were involved in large-scale killings across the country. 

Ren’s father, Ren Moxhum, a school principal from a successful business family, was all kinds of wrong for the Red Guards. He was educated, which in the climate of the time automatically made him a “counter-revolutionary.”. He was paraded around his school and town, smeared in black ink, and beaten repeatedly with a stick. He was later sent to a labour camp, where millions were to be “reeducated” working alongside peasants, the only true communists of this period. Later Ren would say of his father: “He endured a hundred tortures, but he would not kill himself.”

Ren himself was one of the luckier ones in the family. In spite of a government ban, he had managed to graduate in engineering in 1968. He too, like millions of other youth, had been sent to a labour camp. His happened to be in Guizhou province, on the border with Vietnam, which also was a secret military complex, manufacturing arms, munitions, aircraft and other paraphernalia of war. Ren was first assigned the role of a cook, then a plumber, and after being sufficiently reeducated, which took a few years, he was made technician. 

Ren and Xi  charted separate but similar against-all-odds paths to the top, their ambitions intersecting at vital points in their lives.

Xi Jinping was a “red princeling”, the term that refers to the children of the communist party elite. During the Cultural Revolution, his father was accused of forming an anti-party group, publicly beaten and shamed and shipped off to the northwest to manage a tractor factory. Xi himself was sent to do hard manual labour on the fields, an experience he now talks about with a degree of reverence. 

Ren Zhengfai would go on to start Huawei in 1987, today one of the world’s most valuable telecom and technology companies. For a large part of its existence, it was and remains the centre of Western, particularly American, ire, for being a part of the Chinese state, its ownership details considered foggy, and allegations that its mobile networks had back-doors that would allow the Chinese state to carry out global surveillance at an unprecedented state. 

Xi Jinping would work slowly and steadily up the ranks of the Communist party, overcoming his father’s fall from grace. In 2012, in what came as a surprise to many, he would become the general secretary of the CPC. In 2022, he would change the party constitution and secure an unprecedented third term for himself. 

Ren and Xi  charted separate but similar against-all-odds paths to the top, their ambitions intersecting at vital points in their lives. But this is Ren’s story, and Xi Jinping comes into it because he has ruled China in some of Huawei's most tumultuous years, and every time Ren and Huawei have been pushed, the state has come to its rescue. 

With Mao’s death, the Cultural Revolution came to an end. In its purges and executions, and the back-breaking work on farms on a starvation diet, it had claimed around 2 million lives, decimated industrial production in China, and deprived an entire generation of higher education. In 1981, the Communist Party officially denounced the Cultural Revolution, calling it a “catastrophe”. From its ruins, a country had to be rebuilt, lives had to be refashioned, a new manifest destiny had to be created. It was a national necessity as much as an individual yearning. While there are many, Ren and Xi are emblematic of the multicoloured Chinese dream that arose from the embers of Maoism.

***

Huawei was formed in 1987, driven by Ren’s missionary zeal to manufacture telephone switches for local exchanges that could handle hundreds of calls simultaneously. It had five original shareholders, and their names would not be known till a decade later. In course of time, Ren and his trusted band of lieutenants would transform Huawei into a telecommunications and technology giant, operating in 170 countries, the backbone of 3G and 4G mobile networks across continents, a major global player in surveillance cameras, and consumer electronics like mobile phones. In 2024, it earned revenues of $118 billion, spent nearly a quarter of its sales revenue on research and development, and in spite of a global effort led by America to deny it technology, components, and access to make a 5G chip, it managed to create one in-house in 2022. It employs more than 200,000 people. Huawei’s networks reach three billion, and while it has been doubted, challenged and scuppered along the way, it has emerged only stronger. Its resilience is another reason it is seen as an arm of the Chinese state—the company that survives. 

Dou’s sole focus is on the enormously complex company, its philosophies and mysteries, the persona of  Ren Zhengfei, and the Chinese state’s strong supporting role in its success.

Huawei has been the subject of at least a dozen major works in English and Chinese, including books, anthologies, documentaries. Its own archives are significant: they contain eight volumes of In his own words: Dialogues with Ren, five volumes of On the record: Huawei Executives Speak to the Public; and Chinese and English editions of Huawei People, the company’s internal newspapers dating back to 1993. In addition, there are two volumes of Huawei Interviews conducted by Tian Tao, a journalist in China who later became an advisor to the company. Tao’s interviews conducted over two years involved “500 to 600 employees” and generated transcripts totalling “six to seven million words”. They offer unparalleled insights to researchers. Tao says he was motivated by some of the same questions that continue to dog the company: Who owns it? Who drives its growth? Is the Chinese government the great benefactor paving the way for Huawei?

Into this crowded body of work, wades in Washington Post’s tech policy reporter Eva Dou, with her book, The House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company (Penguin Random House, 2025). The author’s note starts with the declaration: “This is a work of journalism, which means that nothing is invented or fictionalized.” To Dou’s credit, that is how the book pans out: a product of deep analysis and impressive original reportage, every claim cited, every fact referenced. Not for Dou the grand journalistic flourish of narrative truth or the universal declaration derived from a microcosm of a stray fact and observation. She keeps her nose steadfastly to the ground, rummaging through records and literature, uncovering trails of documents and piercing the corporate veil, all the while following events in real-time like the arrest of Ren’s daughter Meng Wangzhou in Canada in connection to an old case of supply of telecom equipment to Iran. 

Dou’s sole focus is on the enormously complex company, its philosophies and mysteries, the persona of  Ren Zhengfei, and the Chinese state’s strong supporting role in its success. In the best traditions of journalism, the reporter never interjects herself in the story. The book has an even tone, a conspicuously non-judgmental voice that is increasingly rare in works of book-length reportage these days. 

***

The House of Huawei begins with Meng Wangzhou’s arrest in Vancouver in December 2018, over an old charge that Huawei had supplied telecom equipment to Iran in spite of sanctions. It was done at the behest of the United States, and according to the plan, Meng was supposed to be extradited. It came down to an old company document from Mauritius, where briefly Meng was director of a Huawei subsidiary as well as of another company that supplied equipment to Iran. For the US government and its national security apparatus, long suspicious of Huawei and its success, it was a gotcha moment. Meng was not just anyone, she was Ren’s daughter from his first marriage, and the Chief Financial Officer of the company. It was another matter that till that point Ren hadn’t named her his successor and had hinted in interviews and speeches that he didn’t think she was leadership material, or a general in the trenches. For Ren, Huawei was always battling for survival, always faced with existential threats. 

Ren saw an opportunity in the telephone switches for exchanges, as China was trying to increase its phone connections. In 1980, Schenzen had just two public telephones.

Meng’s arrest, on the back of unrelenting US investigations and Congressional hearings on Huawei’s ownership, its relationship to the Chinese government, achieved something not seen before. It forced Ren to emerge from the shadows. It caused a flutter across journalism circles, when an invitation to interact with Ren and tour Huawei’s R&D centre in the outskirts of Shenzhen landed on the desk of editors across the world. It was a departure from form by Ren, very much from the keep-your head-down-and-keep working school of CEOs. Ren’s PR blitz was successful, most media came back guarded but impressed, and were blown away by the outrageousness of the R&D campus. Spread over a 1.2  square kilometres, Huawei’s Dongguan campus by the lake is a miniature of 12 European cities, and contains replicas of Versailles Palace, Heidelberg Castle amongst others. Ren wanted his employees to be inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment, to acquire a polish that would enable them to do business across the world. He wanted his salespeople, the “wolf army”, to be ruthless but kill softly. In this media blitz, Ren said a version of what Huawei and its senior leadership has been saying to governments across the world, only that this one stuck: “We are a company that sells water taps and pipes. How can anyone ask for water from a hardware store like us?”

In Canada, where Meng partly lived, she was put under house arrest pending extradition hearings. The Chinese government reacted immediately, arresting two Canadian nationals, both named Michael, on charges of international espionage. They would be denied visits or calls, and even be put in solitary confinement inside padded cells for days. The message was clear: An attack on Huawei, would result in strong state retaliation. 

***

Huawei's early days coincided with the opening up of the Chinese economy under Deng Xiaoping. It was almost a necessity after the wreckage left by the Cultural Revolution. In 1979-80, the government decided to set up a Special Economic Zone in the southern coastal city of Shenzhen, across the bay from Hong Kong, still a British protectorate at the time. In all accounts of Shenzhen, domestic and foreign, it is portrayed as a “small, sleepy, coastal village” that was through sheer force of will transformed into the world’s factory floor within decades. This is simply not true. In her book, The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City, architect and scholar Juan Du writes that almost every myth of Shenzhen is untrue. It was not a small coastal village, but a thriving place inhabited by 300,000 people, had harbours that had been trading for more than a millennia, and had a civilizational history going back to at least 6 BCE. The Shenzhen mythmaking was essential, for those who travelled there to make a living from the north, as well as for foreigners looking for a great story of success, writes Du. 

It was into this Shenzhen that Ren wandered into in the early 80s, working for a couple of state enterprises, but all the time thinking about striking out on his own. He saw an opportunity in the telephone switches for exchanges, as China was trying to increase its phone connections. In 1980, Schenzen had just two public telephones. Senior CPC members and officials had their own separate network for communication. The entire telecom network was run on imported equipment.  Ren and his five investors pooled together 21,000 Yuan and formed Huawei on September 15, 1987. Huawei started as assemblers of telephone switches, fire alarms, and other such jobs on contract. Ren, however, wasn’t content to be a contract manufacturer, he wanted to create his own telephone switch. He scoured the country’s universities, looking for the best engineers to join his team. In 1993, Ren rented space for R&D, an entire floor of a building with no AC. His early group of engineers lived there, working round the clock. When the heat got too much, they dunked water on themselves and got back to work. 

Since the early days—at least since 1989, writes Dou—Ren started making his employees shareholders in the company. It was his way of raising capital for research and development, ensuring loyalty, and sharing dividends. The Chinese law at that time didn’t allow for such an arrangement, but since China didn’t even have a corporate law at this point, Ren could get away with it. The company’s shares came with certain conditions: employees couldn’t use it to overrule management, nor sell it to outsiders, and if they left the company, they had to sell the shares back. It was an early version of stakeholder capitalism that Huawei pioneered in China. 

The Huawei switch turned out to be a huge success, coming at just the right time for China, where a telecom revolution was underway.

To make a switch similar to AT&T No. 4, that could handle thousands of calls at the same time, Ren needed big capital at a time where it wasn’t clear at all that Huawei could pull off its own digital switch. In 1993, he came up with a plan of setting up a subsidiary where the 17 founding shareholders were local municipal bodies and telecom bureaus. They provided the capital, were promised dividends, and would also be the buyers. It says something for the Chinese system that it empowered local bodies to make a bold bet to deploy public funds on a company to manufacture something it hadn't ever before, and where success was uncertain. The same year, Ren started a subsidiary in Santa Clara, California, which in turn entered into an agreement with Motorola, which helped Huawei to get  their hands on research and prototypes. A year later, in 1994, Ren would utter one of his famous Renisms, the one that has stuck most to him, often to Huawei’s detriment: “A country without its own program-controlled switches is like one without an army.”

Hiccups, quality, and production glitches aside, the Huawei switch turned out to be a huge success, coming at just the right time for China, where a telecom revolution was underway. New phone lines were doubling and more a year. 

***

In the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Hearing, September 2012, Charles Ding, Huawei Vice-Present and its American representative was asked: “If the Chinese government or the Chinese Communist Party were to come to you, Mr. Ding…are you not required to give them access?”

Ding replied: “ I personally do not know clearly about such a law in China. And if Huawei is put into that situation, I think we would say no.”

One of the reasons for Huawei’s complex ownership structure is that it was ahead of the law in a China still coming to grips with private enterprise.

A law like that does exist. Article 11 of the State Security Law is so expansively worded that it would in effect allow the Chinese government to intercept and inspect any telecommunication equipment belonging to “any individual or organization”. Versions of the same law, with more checks and balances, do exist around the world; the national security exception is common to governments of all kinds. Huawei has said multiple times that it is neither aware of any such law nor has it ever received any requests under it. 

Huawei first appeared on the Western national security radar during the Gulf War. American forces had bombed a telecom installation in Iraq, and discovered a web of fibre optic cables that they had no clue about. It was from Huawei, as was the telecom infrastructure in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Since then, the American national security wing has kept an eye on the company. It was partly driven by deep suspicion of China, whose rise as a superpower was just beginning, and partly the shock of having discovered a Chinese company deploying tech that was earlier the sole preserve of America and its allies. 

The ownership question has always dogged Huawei: its original five investors were unknown for a long time, and later its unique version of employee-owned company was looked at as a smokescreen for something sinister by the West. Ren himself only owns only 0.73 per cent, almost all of the company is owned by more than 151,000 present and former employees, many of whom, especially in senior positions are also members of the Communist Party, including Ren. By one account, 14,000 of Huawei employees are CCP members. When Huawei turned itself into a limited liability company in 1997, an exception had to be made for it, because it had more shareholders than the law permitted. 

Dou writes that one of the reasons for Huawei’s complex ownership structure is that it was always ahead of the law in a China still coming to grips with privately-owned enterprises. In 1996, Huawei launched an internal party branch, the heads of which have been some of Ren’s most trusted people. It is the norm for corporations in China to have internal party committees. It is after all a country where more than 100 million people are members of the sole ruling party.     

Ren created a sales force like soldiers earning their battle stripes in war. They were in Kabul when the rest were fleeing, they stayed put in Iraq during the wars, and braved Russian winters.

In 1996, Ren hired law professors and scholars to create a management structure for the company. Called Huawei Basic Law, it explicitly states: “Profit maximization is by no means our only pursuit.” Nor is creating shareholder wealth by that measure. And it put into code, automatic pay cuts for when the company doesn’t perform well, as well as a baseline 10 per cent of sales that has to be ploughed back into R&D. Huawei today holds more than 140,000 patents, a far cry from the days when it was accused of intellectual property theft.

Ren created a sales force deployed across the world, like soldiers earning their battle stripes in different theatres of war. They were in Kabul when the rest were fleeing, they stayed put in Iraq during the wars, and braved Russian winters when necessary. Ren held “mass resignation” events where people prepared two documents, one detailing their work summary and other a resignation letter. Ren would sign only one. At the same time, he encouraged his employees to acquire cultural refinements, appreciate arts, and be men of the world. Tech prowess aside, a good deal of Huawei success is from its sales teams, the kind of dedicated, aggressive army the telecom world hadn’t seen before.

*** 

It is clear from Dou’s book that the state has always been there for Huawei. In 1996, China's government launched a $1 billion semiconductor fund. Huawei was one of the eight companies chosen for it. In 2005, the state-owned China Development Bank gave it a loan of $10 billion. When China’s vice-president travelled abroad in 1996, he carried Huawei telephone switches as diplomatic gifts. When Xi Jinping visited the UK, Huawei’s research centre was the only private company premises he toured; and when Ren’s daughter and Huawei CFO Meng Wangzhou was arrested, the Chinese government wasted no time in arresting two Canadian citizens. Meng was finally released on a deferred prosecution deal, only after Xi and the then US president Joe Biden had a telephone conversation about their mutual desire to see the prisoners home. 

 Huawei in turn constructed a telecom tower at the top of Mount Everest, enabled surveillance in Xinjiang, and covered every bit of Beijing with CCTV cameras during the 2008 Olympics, a project that Xi Jinping, the vice-president then, was overseeing. If Huawei is a national champion enabled by the state, that bet has already paid off. In spite of the trade war unleashed against it by the Trump and Biden administrations, in spite of cutting its access to European and American markets, and denying it essential software and components to build its 5G chip, it seems to have only grown stronger. The point was reinforced when in 2022, it fitted its own 5G chip inside its mobile phones. 

Edward Snowden’s revelations clearly showed that the US NSA had, in fact, hacked into Huawei’s servers, source code of chips and even emails of top employees including Ren. In the UK, where Huawei had rolled out 4G mobile networks and had secured the contract for 5G deployment, GCHQ, the security and cyber agency, had conducted vulnerability studies and had been provided with full access to the network

Big strategic businesses are always enmeshed with state interests, and have episodes in their history they wouldn’t want to make public, whether it was IBM that sold attendance punch cards used in concentration camps for Jews in Nazi Germany, or the role some of the biggest German multinational companies of today in arming and enabling Hitler. China’s Great Firewall, that allows its censors to curtail the Internet as they desire, is enabled by the tech sold by Cisco Systems, the American company.

Dou captures not just Huawei’s history, but also paints a portrait of Chinese Dream, first mentioned by Xi Jinping in 2012, “No one will be well-off, until the state and nation are well-off.” The Chinese miracle is there for everyone to see—the largest number of people pulled out of poverty in the shortest time ever recorded in human history. 

Dou’s account does not conclusively  answer any questions concerning Huawei, but it provides an authoritative account of all things Huawei based on information available and gathered till now. She allows herself a rare flourish at the very end of the book that best describes her subject: “Huawei is a company made in the image of its nation, in all its fearsomeness and flaws, in all its courage and poetry.”