House of Huawei: The Secret History of China's Most Powerful Company - Hardcover

Dou, Eva

 
9780593544631: House of Huawei: The Secret History of China's Most Powerful Company
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593544633 ISBN 13: 9780593544631
Verlag: Portfolio, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

“Authoritative… a tale that sits at the heart of the most significant geopolitical relationship today.” – Financial Times

“There’s probably no better account of China’s rise to economic dominance as seen through the prism of a single company.” – The Wall Street Journal


ABOUT THE BOOK


The untold story of the mysterious company that shook the world.

On the coast of southern China, an eccentric entrepreneur spent three decades steadily building an obscure telecom company into one of the world’s most powerful technological empires with hardly anyone noticing. This all changed in December 2018, when the detention of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies’ female scion, sparked an international hostage standoff, poured fuel on the US-China trade war, and suddenly thrust the mysterious company into the global spotlight.

In House of Huawei, Washington Post technology reporter Eva Dou pieces together a remarkable portrait of Huawei’s reclusive founder, Ren Zhengfei, and how he built a sprawling corporate empire—one whose rise Western policymakers have become increasingly obsessed with halting. Based on wide-ranging interviews and painstaking archival research, House of Huawei dissects the global web of power, money, influence, surveillance, bloodshed, and national glory that Huawei helped to build—and that has also ensnared it.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eva Dou covers technology policy for The Washington Post. A Detroit native, she previously spent around a decade covering international politics and technology for the Post and the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, Seoul and Taipei. She is currently based in Washington D.C.

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1

The Bookseller

The Ren Family: 1937-1968

Ren Moxun sold "good books." That was what he and his friends called patriotic literature. They were seeking to inspire their countrymen to heroism at a time when it was urgently needed. They'd considered names like Advancement Bookstore and Pioneering Bookstore before finally settling on July Seventh Bookstore. The reference was obvious: Earlier that year, on July 7, 1937, Japanese troops had crossed the Marco Polo Bridge, captured the capital, and continued their invasion of China. World War II would not come for Europe for another two years, when Adolf Hitler invaded Poland. But here in China, the war was already upon them. Ren Moxun opened up the bookstore in the small town of Rongxian, in southern Guangxi Province, and threw himself into the war effort.

Ren Moxun was around twenty-seven at this time, and he had a high forehead, long cheeks, and bushy eyebrows. The only one among his siblings to have attended university, he cultivated a professorial air and wore horn-rimmed spectacles. He revered books, schooling, and the written word, a predisposition he would pass down to his seven children. At the time he opened his bookstore, reading was still a hobby for the privileged elite. If you pulled five people off the street at random, you'd be lucky if one could read. Chinese script was difficult to learn: it had no alphabet, and you had to memorize each word, one by one. Still, there was enough interest in Rongxian for a bookstore. Ren Moxun stocked revolutionary titles from a supplier in Guilin: Karl Marx's Das Kapital, Vladimir Lenin's The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, the complete works of the modern Chinese thinker Lu Xun. He and his colleagues placed a bench at the front so that frugal students could sit and read for free. Outside the bookstore, they propped up a blackboard to scrawl news of the war, something of an unofficial village newspaper. They started a political reading club too, which gathered for spirited discussions.

In his day job, Ren Moxun served as an accountant for a Nationalist military factory supporting the fight against Japan. The Nationalists, China's rulers at the time, were also embroiled in a civil war against Mao Zedong's Communists, who were seeking to overthrow them with the help of the peasantry. As they fought Japan's invasion, the two sides had brokered a delicate truce, an agreement Ren Moxun strongly endorsed. When one faction of Communist revolutionaries in his town began advocating to end the détente with the Nationalists, he denounced them as traitors. These were tense times. People disagreed on what was the right path for the nation, on who was friend or foe, on whether a book was a "good book" or not. One day in March 1938, some Nationalist officers searched the bookstore and pulled out a big pile of books that they demanded not be sold. Ren Moxun and his colleagues found a clever workaround. They piled the banned books into a vitrine and scrawled a sign on it: Inside This Cabinet Are Banned Books. As it turned out, the books inside the cabinet sold briskly.

The July Seventh Bookstore was shut down by the Nationalists in the second half of 1939. Its owners held a fire sale to get a last batch of good books out to the people. Ren Moxun considered traveling to Yan'an to join Mao's Communists but found the roads impassable. So he crossed to the rolling hills of the neighboring province, Guizhou, where he found work as a teacher.

Guizhou Province is a hilly region slightly smaller than Missouri, set inland from China's southwestern border with Vietnam. Monsoons sweep the subtropical region each summer, watering the terraced paddies of sticky rice. Cold drizzles continue through the winter. The area's indigenous people were the Bouyei, who spoke their own language and also inhabited northern Vietnam. For centuries, China's emperors considered the area an impoverished borderland where even cooking salt was sometimes in short supply. Even in the modern day, Guizhou retains the reputation of a hardship posting for officials.

In Guizhou, Ren Moxun met a seventeen-year-old named Cheng Yuanzhao. With big brown eyes, round cheeks, and a broad smile, she was also bright and good with numbers. They married, and Cheng Yuanzhao soon became pregnant.

Their son was born in October 1944, and they named him Ren Zhengfei. It was an ambiguous name. Zheng meant "correct," and fei meant "not." "Right or wrong" would be a fair translation. It wasn't like the common, straightforward boys' names. Jiabao meant "family treasure." Jianguo meant "build the nation." But what did a name like his mean?

Japan's occupation of China ended abruptly the year after Ren Zhengfei's birth, when the Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For all the efforts of Ren Moxun and his compatriots, it was America's superior bomb technology that ended the Japanese occupation. In China, there would not yet be peace. Civil war resumed between the Nationalists and Communists. Ren Moxun and Cheng Yuanzhao had six more children, all while both parents worked teaching local students in spare conditions, under the glow of kerosene lamps. Cheng served for a period as an elementary school principal.

In 1949, Mao Zedong emerged victorious. It was clear that Ren Moxun had picked the wrong side by working for the Nationalists during the war. It wasn't yet clear how dire the consequences would be for his family.

On a foggy morning in 1950, Ren Moxun rode a horse-drawn carriage into the town of Zhenning. The name Zhenning meant “town of peace,” but Ren Moxun, seated in the middle of the cart and surrounded by three armed men who kept their Mauser guns trained outward, arrived with some trepidation. The fog was so thick the men could see only a few meters ahead on the winding dirt road, and they feared that unfriendly locals might attack them. Officials had tasked Ren Moxun with launching a new middle school for Bouyei children in Zhenning, one that would teach them the Mandarin Chinese language and help integrate them into the nascent Communist republic. Mao’s new government was seeking to solidify its control over a sprawling territory that, for most of its history, had been not a unified whole but self-governing fiefdoms speaking different tongues. A unifying language was not just a linguistic issue but a political one.

Ren Moxun and his colleagues began setting up a new boarding school, going door-to-door to recruit students across the countryside. Fewer than half of the students spoke fluent Mandarin. Many of the older residents didn't speak Mandarin at all. Ren Moxun and his staff learned conversational Bouyei. Attendance was a challenge for students who had to travel a great distance. Many families also couldn't afford the school fees. Ren Moxun and his staff came up with a solution: the students and faculty would make up the budget shortfall through part-time farming. He got the government to give them an acre of land, where the students planted crops and raised pigs. The labor of the students and teachers enabled the school to cover its costs, including meals and a free blue uniform for each student.

Mao's officials believed they were extending a civilizing influence to the nation's frontiers-Guizhou in the south, Inner Mongolia in the north, Tibet and Xinjiang in the west. The residents didn't necessarily see it that way. They had lived for centuries with their own languages and customs, and they were now being compelled to assimilate. There were those who did not like Ren Moxun and his school either. After someone threatened to kill him with a hand grenade-the precise reasons are unclear-the school was issued four rifles to protect the staff and students.

One of Ren Moxun's objectives was to inculcate his students with the right beliefs. "Principal...

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Verlag
Portfolio
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593544633
ISBN 13 
9780593544631
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
448
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Portfolio
https://www.wetones.co.uk/

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