The Secret History of China's Most Powerful Company

How did a small Shenzhen-based manufacturer of telephone switches defy tough domestic and international competition to become a world leader in telecoms technology? And how did it manage to start producing its own 5G processors despite international sanctions specifically designed to prevent this from happening?

In House of Huawei, Eva Dou lifts the veil of secrecy surrounding the tight-lipped company. Dou is a technology reporter for The Washington Post and spent seven years in China and Taiwan covering politics and technology for The Wall Street Journal. Tapping into her wide network of contacts in the sector, she has put together a thoroughly researched, credible and balanced account.

Dou highlights two turning points. The shift from analogue to digital technology in the early 1990s allowed Huawei to expand production and begin supplying China’s state-owned enterprises. At that point, Ren made sure that his company was on the radar screen of the country’s top leaders. The second turning point came a decade later, when Huawei went global.

As Huawei expanded, so did its symbiotic relationship with China’s party-state. The government helped to ensure the company’s success, while Huawei supported the expansion of state surveillance. Soon after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, he initiated the Sharp Eyes urban surveillance program and blanketed China with security cameras. In response, Huawei developed its Safe City facial recognition technology, which is now used throughout China and has been bought by countries in Asia, Africa and even Europe.

China’s national intelligence law requires organisations and individuals to ‘support, assist and cooperate with state intelligence work’, a clause that is frequently cited to justify sanctions placed on Huawei. Ren vehemently denies that Huawei has provided or would provide the Chinese state with access to its data networks. Dou is unconvinced but reminds us that China is hardly the only state that demands access to confidential telecommunications data.

Dou makes a valiant effort to dissect Huawei’s opaque organisational structure. Legally, Huawei is a limited liability company, with Ren holding about 1 percent of the shares, and the employees, represented by a trade union, holding the balance. On paper, Huawei’s highest authority is the shareholders’ meeting, to which the board of directors and the chief executive report. However, Dou concludes that the formal structure has little significance, with key decisions made by a group of top executives and Ren.

Huawei’s basic law stresses that Huawei is not a Western-style company focused on maximising shareholder value. Rather, Huawei’s purpose is ‘to become a leading world-class enterprise’ in its field. Ultimately, Dou likens Huawei to the Chinese Communist Party, whose purpose is to ensure its own long-term survival.

For the past decade, Huawei has been caught in the crossfire of the technology war between the United States and China. In 2018, Ren’s daughter, at the time Huawei’s chief financial officer, was detained in Canada at the request of the US. The US accused her of covering up Huawei’s sale of telecoms equipment to Iran in violation of US sanctions. The following year, president Donald Trump declared a national emergency based on ‘vulnerabilities in information technology’, a clear reference to Huawei’s market dominance.

The resulting export controls hobbled Huawei’s growth but also encouraged the company to develop its own technology. Huawei eventually took the lead in 5G and in doing so polarised the world. Australia, Canada, Britain, New Zealand and the US banned Huawei technology, as did India, Japan, South Korea and most of Western Europe. Russia, Southeast Asia and much of the global south adopted it.

Trump’s 2025 trade war has fanned the flames of the conflict. In June, the US and China agreed to a framework for resolving their trade disputes but left the details to be worked out. In a nutshell, US industries need rare earth metals, on which China has a stranglehold, while China needs access to US semiconductors.

House of Huawei is an essential read for anyone following the unfolding struggle for technological supremacy.

Robert Wihtol is an adjunct faculty member at the Asian Institute of Management and former Asian Development Bank country director for China and director general for East Asia.

This article appeared originally at The Strategist (ASPI).