House of Huawei, written by Eva Dou, chronicles the foundation and development over the years of Huawei. This is a company at the forefront of technology and one of the largest 5G equipment suppliers, if not the largest, in the world. However, Huawei is marred by controversies. Chinese laws enable the Chinese government to demand any company operating in the country total collaboration in the name of national security. Because Huawei provides telecommunications equipment, other nations, especially those in the West, are concerned that the company is the conduit for Beijing.

This concern caused Huawei to lose lucrative contracts, face intense scrutiny around the world and suffer commercial bans. The company tried its best to assuage other governments, but to no avail. This failure stems from the fact that Huawei could not show any definitive proof that it could say no to Beijing whenever there is a request for collaboration. Furthermore, Huawei also got into trouble for its business deals in the Middle East, especially with Iran, when sanctions were in effect. For good measure, Huawei was sued by multiple companies for allegedly intellectual properties infringement.

Huawei was founded by Ren Zhengfei, who was born in Guizhou, China, in 1944. Ren Zhengfei’s father, Ren Moxun, owned a bookstore selling books that were edgy and controversial at the time. In his day job, Ren Moxun worked for the Nationalists, who ruled China at the time and were in a civil war against the Communist Party led by Mao Zedong. Soon, the Japanese retreated from China and the Communists emerged victorious. Because of his work for the Nationalists, Ren Zhengfei’s father was imprisoned for a few years.

The younger Ren went to college and thanks to the luck of his birth year, he managed to complete an education in heating, gas supply and ventilation engineering, right before Mao Zedong forced every youth to labor in the countryside. Ren Zhengfei’s brother did not have such luck. I wonder what Ren Zhengfei’s life would have been like had he not finished his education.

Zhengfei joined the military right after college, served multiple roles, volunteered for a difficult project between China and France, and learned about electronics. His fortune changed for the better when Mao died and Deng Xiaopeng took over. Deng Xiaopeng valued scientific research and Ren Zhengfei was soon recognized as one of the top scientists in the country. The family soon moved to Shenzhen, where Ren caught a lucky break. The city allowed the establishment of private technology companies as a pilot program in 1987. Ren, along with his five original partners, soon created Huawei. The rest is history.

Ren became an entrepreneur at 44 after having 2-3 kids. He is infamous for an insane work ethic. His wife accused him of putting work above his family. He had multiple health issues due to long working hours. Even when it was not safe in countries like Iraq during the attack by the US, Ren Zhengfei and his team still put in the efforts. In addition, Zhengfei had an amazing vision and business acumen. He set up a chip division in secret and kept it away from the spotlight for years. He also pivoted the company to consumer electronics and catapulted Huawei to among the top brands. He chose to prioritize 3G over 2G when 3G was just a novelty. Controversial as it may be, Huawei definitely put in the work to earn its success.

I found Eva Dou’s work incredibly thoroughly researched. The book is quite long, but it’s intriguing and easy enough to follow. Really recommend it.

“Ren now exhorted his sales team to develop a “wolf culture.” “Wolves are really powerful,” Ren told his staff. “They have a keen sense of smell, they are very aggressive, and they don’t attack alone but in packs. As soon as one falls, another steps into the breach. They don’t fear sacrifice.” To win orders, they made bold promises. In a memoir, one former Huawei salesman wrote that his manager had instructed him to tell customers a switch would be ready soon when they both knew it would be months. “Do you think it’s better for the customer to doubt the company or to doubt the ability of a single engineer?” his boss had reasoned. Huawei would build a reputation for courting its customers relentlessly, loitering at hotels or airports to catch traveling officials, even waiting outside their homes. In 1995, China officially switched from a six-day workweek to a five-day one, but Huawei’s staff continued to work around the clock.”

“In any case, Huawei had a reputation for generosity and hospitality within the industry. It paid for government officials and telecom executives to travel the world for conferences and training sessions. When they visited Huawei’s headquarters, they were greeted with lavish feasts. Ren told his sales managers to continue sending birthday cakes to retired telecom experts who had helped Huawei.

After he left government office, Li Zibin, former mayor of Shenzhen, was visiting the US in 2007 when there was a knock on his hotel door. He opened it to find Ren standing there, inviting him to dinner. Li was stunned. He wrote in his memoir that Ren told him, “That’s just me, Ren Zhengfei. When you were in office for eleven years, our company didn’t invite you to dinner once. But Huawei’s people know to be grateful. You are our benefactor, and now that you are retired, I’m inviting you to dinner.”

“Since 2007, Huawei had sold not only networking gear itself but also managed services, or outsourced tech support, to operators around the world. This meant that Huawei’s engineers were contractually obligated to be available if a network operator was experiencing problems. With the Arab Spring turning violent, Ren set off across the Middle East to steel his staff’s nerves.

During his visits to Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Mali, Ren told Huawei employees that while he sympathized with family members’ concerns over their safety, they couldn’t leave their posts without properly handing off their work. “You can’t flee unconditionally,” he said. “Our professional ethos is to maintain the stability of the network.” He reminded them that theirs was a special vocation. “Tofu shops, fried dough stands, and the like can be shut down at any time, but we cannot.” Ren advised his staff that they should “never” interfere in the politics of any country. “If we give up the network’s stability, then even more people will be sacrificed.”

Huawei helped the Chinese embassy in Turkey facilitate the evacuation of Chinese nationals from Libya, but some of Huawei’s own engineers stayed behind. ”

“As Huawei’s smartphone business boomed, it began to draw attention to an obscure corner of the company’s business empire. Gadget reviewers began noticing, with intrigue, that some of Huawei’s phones ran on processors designed by Huawei’s in-house HiSilicon label. These chips were surprisingly good for a brand that Huawei did little to promote. The ability of a telecom company to design its own chips reflected an advanced technical level, with few smartphone makers aside from Apple and Samsung able to do so.

In 2014, reviewers reported that the HiSilicon processor in Huawei’s Honor 6 smartphone was outperforming even the iPhone in certain benchmarks, though it had marked problems in areas like power consumption. “This is a very interesting result,” one reviewer remarked. Ren was wary of HiSilicon getting too much attention. It risked disrupting Huawei’s relationships with third-party chip suppliers like Qualcomm; the companies might start to see Huawei as a rival instead of a partner. HiSilicon was also still a major supplier for the surveillance-camera industry, something Huawei didn’t tend to talk too much about.

A reporter at China’s national broadcaster, CCTV, once told Ren it was a pity that more people didn’t need to know “about HiSilicon. “Why does the outside world need to know?” Ren replied. “The outside world doesn’t need to know this.”

“Long before anyone had heard of Ren Zhengfei or Huawei, Wan Runnan had been China’s star entrepreneur in the 1980s, with his company, the Stone Group, touted as “China’s IBM.” Wan had believed that economic change could lead to political change. He had thrown his support behind the pro-democracy protesters in 1989. As a result, he had to flee to France, with an arrest warrant hanging over his head. He was never able to return home.

Now, decades later and in failing health in Paris, Wan recalled something that had happened one day in the late 1980s, when he was still living in Beijing. Local officials had invited him to dinner. This was unusual. He was usually the one to invite officials to dine, so as to curry favor with the show of hospitality. Over the meal, the officials told Wan that the Ministry of State Security was going to send agents to work undercover at his company in positions dealing with international relations. The officials cast the move to embed these minders as an act of protection for Wan and the company’s other executives, a security measure that would keep them from stumbling into unseen risks in their dealings with foreigners. “You have a lot of international business, which raises security issues for you. There are situations that you don’t understand,” Wan recalled the officials telling him. “They said, ‘We are sending some people over. You can just treat them like regular employees.’ ”

“This parallel to China’s governance system offers a lens through which an answer to the question of who controls Huawei can finally be hazarded. Here is what we know about China’s government: the collective governance model obscures who, exactly, is making decisions, and this is by design. Many times, it is the core leader making the decisions, due to his centralized power, but esteemed elders often wield considerable influence in the wings. It can even be possible for them to override the nominal leader on decisions. The party’s internal disciplinary mechanism—present for both the government and for Huawei—serves as a powerful stick to keep individual officials in line, as it allows the party to oust those who are ideologically out of step.

Huawei’s goal, like the party’s, is to ensure its own long-term survival. Achieving this goal requires winning enough buy-in from its workers. But maximizing shareholder value—or individuals’ well-being—is not the end in and of itself. Such a system has strengths and weaknesses. A strength is its ability to accomplish titanic tasks at almost impossible speeds by getting everyone to pull in unison. A weakness is that such a system is “is often strong but brittle, and its success can come at crushing costs for the individuals involved.

Huawei is a company made in the image of its nation, in all its fearsomeness and flaws, in all its courage and poetry.”