How Huawei went from Chinese startup to global 5G powerHow Huawei went from Chinese startup to global 5G power

A new book by the Washington Post's Eva Dou is a comprehensive and readable account of Huawei's rapid rise on the world's telecom stage.

Iain Morris, International Editor

January 16, 2025

6 Min Read
Huawei logo displayed on a smartphone
(Source: © Omar Marques/SOPA Images via ZUMA Press Wire)

In 1995, an obscure Chinese company with a semi-pronounceable name received state approval for mass production of its first telephone switch. The C&C08 was supposedly based on its own design. But to one Western executive able to peer inside, it bore a suspicious resemblance to the No. 5 switch used by AT&T, America's biggest telco. Nevertheless, some 20 years later, Huawei, the implied copycat of the tale, had overtaken much older European and North American heavyweights to become the world's biggest manufacturer of telecom equipment.

This and the broader story of its dramatic rise from exceedingly humble origins, through to its recent blacklisting by US authorities, is the subject of a new book by Eva Dou, a business correspondent for the Washington Post, entitled House of Huawei: Inside the secret world of China's most powerful company.

Dou's interest in Huawei, like that of other mainstream reporters, was evidently piqued by the first Trump administration's campaign against it, including the long detainment in Canada of then chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, daughter of company founder Ren Zhengfei. Dou was clearly among the group of reporters invited for interviews with Ren in China just weeks after Meng's arrest. But she has supplemented her own first-hand reports of more recent events by digging into Huawei's past and raising some pertinent questions about its future.

What emerges is certainly the most comprehensive and coherent account of Huawei so far. Chris Miller's recent Chip War, a brilliantly readable history of the semiconductor industry and the geopolitics that surround it, featured the Chinese company in more than one chapter but was never intended as an outright biography, and there has been a dearth of other English-language attempts to scrutinize Huawei. It remains as secretive as the title of Dou's book makes out, adopting a bunker mentality after its short-lived attempts at openness when the US first began to impose sanctions.

The normally reclusive figure of Ren, who founded Huawei in 1987, looms especially large in the story. It is as much a biography of him as it is of the company, beginning with his childhood as the son of a Chinese bookseller from Guangxi Province and charting his years in the military, during China's devastating Cultural Revolution, and his entrepreneurialism in the Deng Xiaoping era, when Marxist economic doctrine was being abandoned. Whatever one's view of Huawei and the level of risk it poses outside China, Ren is undeniably an impressive individual as described in these pages – not least for his skilled navigation of political turbulence and business crises over the years.

State support

Still, anecdotes about intellectual property abuses will satisfy critics who have long argued Huawei's success is predicated on ripping off foreign – and mainly US – innovation. Dou manages skillfully to dangle the questions while reserving absolute judgment, especially when she recounts Huawei's clash with Cisco in the early 2000s. The seemingly damning detail was the discovery in Huawei routers of the same software bugs originally included by accident in Cisco's source code.

The Chinese company's explanation to the court at the time involved blaming a rogue employee. As Dou writes, "a third party who was not employed by Cisco had given a Huawei employee a disk containing source code for a router protocol, and that employee had given it to a colleague, who'd then proceeded to use it without doing much checking into its provenance." If that sounds "extraordinarily implausible," proving what had really happened turned out to be "difficult."

Huawei also comes out badly from Dou's account of its assault on European markets after 2005. Fortified by a $10 billion loan from the state-owned China Development Bank, it landed a succession of deals with the region's telecom incumbents. The loan is described as a "staggering sum," equal to twice Huawei's annual revenues at the time. To put that in context, a loan of the same magnitude now would be worth about $200 billion. The result was "the beginning of the end for several of Huawei's Western rivals," which could not match its low prices. Reading all that may bring back some bitter memories for the former executives of vendors like Canada's Nortel and the UK's Marconi.

But Dou evokes some sympathy for Huawei regarding the charges that its products could be used for spying or sabotage by China's government. There is no fresh evidence here that Ren or any other Huawei executive has included such "backdoors" in products at the behest of authorities. What seems hard to refute is the possibility this could happen. But the US managed to hack into Huawei's central email system and obtain its source code without needing to be involved in product development, according to the revelations of Edward Snowden, a former employee of the US National Security Agency (NSA) turned whistleblower. Snowden also alleged the NSA had bugged Cisco routers so that it could monitor overseas communications. The likelihood of Chinese agencies doing the same via Huawei does not incriminate it – even if this explains US jitters.

Indeed, the sense of Huawei as a geopolitical victim of the struggle between great powers is a theme of the book. Where American and European readers may feel that Huawei most deserves condemnation is on the ethics side. Under Ren's leadership, it seems to have had no qualms about selling equipment to countries on Western blacklists or aiding surveillance of political opponents by repressive governments, including its own. In 2020, leaked Huawei documents showed its facial-recognition software had "passed" a test for being able to recognize Uyghurs, an ethnic group persecuted by China's government.

Still enigmatic

If there is any criticism of Dou's efforts, it is that none of what she writes is especially new or will come as a great revelation to industry readers. The "secret world" of the subtitle is probably an oversell, suggesting she unearthed facts that had previously been hidden. Links between the Chinese state and Huawei – insistent it is under the ownership of its employees – remain blurred. Although Dou was able to sketch a few lines more clearly, much about Huawei is still an enigma.

There is no specific technical insight that explains how Huawei had "jumped to number one in standard-essential patents" for 5G when so much of the underlying technology is identical to 4G, where it lagged Western rivals. There is also a surprising late mistake when Dou writes that German telcos will "stop using Huawei and ZTE equipment within five years," after a government edict in July 2024. In fact, German telcos have been ordered to remove only Huawei's management system, a decision that could theoretically allow them to retain it as a vendor for most other products.

But the company is made less mysterious by Dou than it was. The apparently flagrant disregard for ethical considerations and western "rules" often comes across as naïve rather than scheming or sinister. It seems at least partly the result of the culture instilled by Ren, shaped as he was by his experiences in the late eighties and early nineties, when China was more chaotic, and survival was paramount. There are also obvious parallels between the structure and governance of Huawei and the way China is run, Dou asserts.

To the general reader interested in the places where business, technology and world affairs overlap, House of Huawei will seem resonant as globalization goes into reverse and Trump 2.0 boots up. A minor criticism, no fault of the author's, is a publishing mistake that omits any of the footnotes numbered in the main text. But as well as being a well-balanced account, it's a breezy and engaging read that requires no former knowledge of Huawei or the technologies it develops. Of course, for those tracking Huawei every week, the story is not yet over.

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About the Author

Iain Morris

International Editor, Light Reading

Iain Morris joined Light Reading as News Editor at the start of 2015 -- and we mean, right at the start. His friends and family were still singing Auld Lang Syne as Iain started sourcing New Year's Eve UK mobile network congestion statistics. Prior to boosting Light Reading's UK-based editorial team numbers (he is based in London, south of the river), Iain was a successful freelance writer and editor who had been covering the telecoms sector for the past 15 years. His work has appeared in publications including The Economist (classy!) and The Observer, besides a variety of trade and business journals. He was previously the lead telecoms analyst for the Economist Intelligence Unit, and before that worked as a features editor at Telecommunications magazine. Iain started out in telecoms as an editor at consulting and market-research company Analysys (now Analysys Mason).

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