What if the world's largest tech company isn't just a business, but a tool of geopolitical struggle? The Huawei story reveals how fear, power, and ambition intertwine in a new Cold War—and why it directly affects us all.
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A review of a book by Washington Post journalist Eva Dou about Huawei — from its founding in 1987 to its survival under American sanctions. The author traces the path of the Chinese technology giant through the lens of founder Ren Zhengfei's biography, geopolitical conflicts and trade wars, showing how a private company became an instrument of the PRC's national strategy.
Telecommunications is a matter of national security. A country without its own switches is like a country without an army. The state must control communications software. And the more intense the competition, the greater the need for government intervention.
No, these aren't talking points from another Security Council meeting or excerpts from some domestic ministry's digital transformation strategy. These are the words of Ren Zhengfei—founder of Huawei Technologies—delivered to the Chinese Communist Party leadership in 1994. Words that were followed by tens of billions of dollars in state financing and three decades of ascent to the summit of the global technology industry.
All of this is covered in exhaustive detail in a book by The Washington Post journalist Eva Dou , published by Penguin (Portfolio). Before diving into the book itself, it's worth understanding why it appeared now—and why it should be of particular interest to us here in Russia.
, "House of Huawei: The Secret History of China's Biggest Company"
Act I. The Switch
To explain to readers what Huawei is, Eva Dou starts from far back. Very far back. From 1937, when Japanese troops crossed the Marco Polo Bridge and the father of the company's future founder—a schoolteacher named Ren Moxun—opened a patriotic bookstore in the provincial town of Rongxian.
This genealogical thread isn't just a nod to the fashion for "human interest stories" in business journalism. Dou shows how the trauma of famine, political repression, and the Cultural Revolution shaped Ren Zhengfei's character: his paranoid fear of failure, his signature "wolf culture" sales approach, his obsession with self-sufficiency. The future Huawei founder's father was branded a "rightist element" under Mao. The family starved. His mother would divide a single corn flour pancake into nine pieces so all the children got something. In Guizhou province, where they lived, roughly ten percent of the population died of hunger, according to historians' estimates.
These pages are among the strongest in the book. Not because they're new to anyone familiar with Chinese history, but because Dou manages to connect private family tragedy with corporate philosophy: Huawei is a company built by a man who knows what a real "winter period" looks like, and therefore is always preparing for one. Ren Zhengfei, already a billionaire, continued writing internal memos to employees with titles like "Winter." He wasn't joking.
Was he joking in 1994 when, presenting his still-raw C&C08 switch to Jiang Zemin, he uttered that famous line about a "country without an army"? Unlikely. But the Party leadership appreciated the analogy. After the General Secretary's visit, obstacles began to "melt away," as Dou puts it. Preferential loans appeared. Government contracts appeared. Joint ventures with local telecommunications bureaus emerged, whose employees became shareholders in Huawei structures—"blood ties" with the state, as one company manager called it.
Does the reader find something painfully familiar in this model? Subsidized loans from a state bank, joint ventures with officials as shareholders, unspoken requirements to buy domestic—here you have a perfectly typical story of a "national champion" in any major economy that has decided to seriously pursue technological sovereignty. With one significant difference, however: the Chinese "champion" has outpaced everyone else.
Act II. The Pipes
By the middle of the book, Dou shifts from family saga to geopolitical thriller. And here begins the most interesting part for readers accustomed to following news about sanctions and trade wars.
Huawei sells, in Ren's own words, "water pipes." Through these pipes flows everything: banking transactions, state secrets, love letters, family photos. In short—data. The most valuable commodity of the information age. By 2012, Huawei had become the world's largest supplier of telecommunications equipment, deploying more than five hundred mobile networks, including networks in sixty-eight capitals worldwide. Its fixed switches and routers were used by forty-five of the planet's fifty largest operators.
Washington grew concerned long before Trump's trade war. Dou meticulously reconstructs the Congressional hearings in September 2012—a scene worthy of John le Carré's pen. Huawei Senior Vice President Charles Ding sits before two rows of grim-faced Americans in suits and repeats again and again: there are no "back doors" in our equipment. Congressmen ask questions about the party cell inside the company, about Article 11 of the PRC National Security Law, about "anomalies" in the code. Ding responds in Chinese through an interpreter—to avoid slips of the tongue, but risking the appearance of someone stalling for time.
The House Intelligence Committee ultimately recommended excluding Huawei from American government systems. The report immediately became a political weapon: Obama's campaign used it to attack Romney, whose company Bain Capital had ties to Huawei. Nowhere in the world—not in Brussels, not in Moscow, not in Beijing—does a corporate issue transform into a weapon of domestic politics as quickly as in Washington. Dou captures this mechanism with journalistic precision.
Act III. The Hostage
The book's climax is the arrest of CFO Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver on December 1, 2018. Dou opens the narrative with precisely this scene, then returns to it near the finale, having armed the reader with three decades of context.
Meng is the founder's daughter. A woman who had traveled with seven passports over eleven years, who owned property in Vancouver, London, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen. A mother of four children. Someone who had undergone surgery to remove thyroid cancer. She stepped off the Cathay Pacific flight in a tracksuit and sneakers, unaware that she was already being watched through a one-way mirror.
Dou reconstructs the episode in detail worthy of a procedural document: Constable Winston Yep waiting behind the mirror; border agents fishing a pink MacBook with a fairy sticker from her luggage; PIN codes written on a scrap of paper. None of this is fiction. This is reconstruction from court transcripts that reads, however, like a thriller.
In parallel, and this is the most bitter part of the book, two Canadians are detained in China—Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. They are held in cells with lights that never go out. Beijing denies any connection to Meng's case, but everyone understands perfectly well the mechanics of what's happening. Dou quotes Bolton, who claims that Trump "knew about everything in advance," though he later stated the opposite. Bolton adds with characteristic imperturbability that the president "knew. Another question is whether he remembered it."
The finale of the diplomatic game comes only in September 2021: Biden and Xi speak by phone, and the captives head home. Meng flies to Shenzhen—the pilot deliberately circumvents U.S. airspace via Russia and Mongolia. Thousands of people track the little airplane icon on FlightRadar. In Shenzhen, she emerges onto the tarmac in a scarlet dress, and on the wall of the city's tallest skyscraper a neon sign lights up: "Welcome home, Meng Wanzhou."
Schoolchildren study her "lesson." The deputy foreign minister declares that the "shackles of hegemony" have been lifted from her. She becomes one of Huawei's three rotating chairmen. The hero has returned.
Act IV. Black Swan
The most recent—and perhaps most important for Russian readers—chapters of the book are devoted to how Huawei survives under sanctions.
In May 2019, the U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security placed Huawei on the export control "blacklist"—the same lethal blow that nearly destroyed ZTE three years earlier. Qualcomm, Intel, Google, Microsoft—all key suppliers were required to cease cooperation. Huawei frantically stockpiled American chips while a three-month "transition period" was in effect, which was later extended to a year.
Dou describes Ren's reaction to losing the Sprint contract—even before sanctions, but after political pressure from Washington—as a moment of inner freedom: "I can finally lift this burden from myself. We no longer have to grovel before them... The result of American arrogance is that we now square our shoulders and compete directly." For a man whose father starved under Mao and whose daughter sat under house arrest in Vancouver, this isn't posturing—it's a mindset.
By summer 2023, Huawei released the Mate 60 Pro smartphone with a chip manufactured at the Chinese SMIC facility—defying sanctions designed to deny the company access to advanced chipmaking technology. How exactly this was accomplished—through purchasing illegal tools or virtuoso use of outdated equipment—nobody knows. Dou compares it to trying to draw a thin line with the edge of a thick brush: technically possible, but requiring exceptional skill.
Washington responded predictably—tightening restrictions on lithography equipment exports to China. The Biden administration, despite its softer rhetoric compared to Trump, only deepened the containment policy. Open RAN architecture was promoted as an alternative to Huawei—a sort of construction kit of interchangeable modules from different suppliers. EU skeptics rightly noted that a system with multiple connection points is more vulnerable to cyberattacks. But Washington pushed it with assembly-line persistence.
In Place of an Afterword
Eva Dou's book is neither a pamphlet nor an indictment. It is perhaps the most detailed chronicle to date of China's largest technology company, written by a Western journalist who spent years on interviews, court documents, and internal Huawei memoranda.
But for all its journalistic thoroughness, the book contains a fundamental conclusion that Dou formulates near the end with admirable honesty. She quotes the founder of Kenyan mobile operator Safaricom, who responds to questions about "backdoors" in Huawei equipment roughly like this: so what? What are you going to do about it? You don't know what other governments are up to. All governments are probably listening to your conversations. And former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad adds in the same vein: America spied on all of us, and we didn't boycott them. Now Huawei has that capability. Let them do what they want.
This is where we enter territory where Russian readers feel right at home. The question isn't whether Huawei spies—or Cisco, or Nokia, or anyone else. The question is that the very framing of this question has become a weapon in a new cold war. And in this war, as Dou demonstrates, there are neither right nor wrong sides—only interests.
For Russia, building its own "digital independence" under unprecedented sanctions, Huawei's experience is not merely a curious case study. It's a mirror reflecting both our own prospects and our own illusions. Huawei—a company with two hundred thousand employees and a thirty-year engineering history—lost ground for years, despite all its resources and Beijing's political support. To expect that Russia will traverse the same path faster and cheaper would be naive. But failing to learn lessons from the Chinese experience would be wasteful.
Dow concludes the book with an observation worth paraphrasing rather than quoting verbatim: Huawei is a company created in the image and likeness of its country, with all its menace and fragility, all its audacity and poetry. There's little to add to that. Except one thing: don't read this book as a story about China. Read it as a story about the 21st century.
