Book Review — ‘House of Huawei’ by Eva Dou

Huawei is more than just a tech company, it is a geopolitical force, and symbol of China’s rise. In ‘House of Huawei’, Eva Dou, a technology reporter for the Washington post, unpacks the story of this telecommunications behemoth and its enigmatic founder, Ren Zhengfei. The book looks into Huawei’s meteoric rise, the political and economic forces that propelled it, and the controversies that have entangled it in global power struggles. Dou’s detailed research and journalistic clarity make this an interesting read, but the book also raises questions that remain unanswered.

The book doesn’t just start with Huawei; it begins with China’s turbulent 20th-century history, showing how national ambitions shaped its industries. One particularly striking episode recounts how Ren Zhengfei’s father, Ren Moxun, suffered under Mao’s Great Leap Forward. He was forced to halve the school curriculum to make time for steelmaking, a disastrous initiative that contributed to widespread famine. “Like Don Quixote, they set up all sorts of imaginary enemies,” Moxun later wrote, lamenting the senseless class struggle that consumed his prime years.

Ren Zhengfei himself was a product of China’s shifting political tides. When he moved to Shenzhen in the 1980s, he was approaching forty and felt out of place in the booming metropolis. He had never seen a supermarket before. He marveled at the salaries of factory workers, which were more than double what he had earned as a military engineer. “People of my age group were the most worthless,” he recalled. “We didn’t understand computers, and our English was not good.” It is astonishing to think that this self-doubting engineer would go on to build a company that would shake the global tech industry.

Huawei’s work culture, as described in the book, is not for the faint-hearted. Ren referred to his employees as his “iron army,” sending them through military-style boot camps and promoting based on battlefield-style performance. “Has this person been in combat? Has this person been in a live firefight? Has this person been wounded?” These were not metaphors; they were the actual criteria used to evaluate staff.

But Huawei’s success was not just about grit, it was also about government backing. Beijing ensured that Huawei had the financial muscle to compete globally. In 2005, the China Development Bank allocated $10 billion to Huawei’s overseas expansion, allowing it to offer telecom operators easy financing deals. This was a game-changer. While competitors had to convince clients to invest upfront, Huawei could simply say, “Take the equipment now, pay later.” It is no wonder that leaders from Nigeria to Germany were eager to sign deals with them, often with China’s president, Hu Jintao, present at the signing ceremonies.

A few interesting bits that caught my attention:

• Huawei is pronounced “hwaa way”, not ‘Hu-wa-way’.
• Chinese names have their surnames first. For instance, Deng Xiaoping’s surname is Deng.
• Talking of the leader who brought capitalism to China, unlike others, Deng requested that when he dies, his corneas should be donated to an eye bank, and his body to be dissected for medical research. All was done like he wanted.
• I love Chinese adages. This one: “crawling between another man’s leg to prevent a deadly fight” reminds me so much of those witty Yoruba sayings.
• IBM was much revered by Ren Zhengfei as a great technology company. Huawei had IBM consultants inhouse for a decade to help with corporate restructuring and international expansion, and earning per hour the salaries of staff per month.
• In its early days, Huawei was almost sold to Motorola.
• Ren owns 1.4% of Huawei and remaining employees share the rest.
• Instead of joining the company, his daughter who studied Computer Science at Harvard University decided to pursue a career as a pop singer. Head scratching!

The book does not shy away from Huawei’s early missteps. In its early days, you could describe Huawei as a company that copies like a dull student. Cisco sued Huawei in 2003, alleging that the Chinese firm had copied its source code — down to the software bugs. Yet, Huawei evolved from a copycat into an industry leader, filing more patents than any other company on earth and becoming a pioneer in 5G technology.

But accusations of intellectual property theft were soon overshadowed by a bigger concern: espionage. The book details how the NSA had been monitoring Huawei for years, worried that its equipment could serve as a Trojan horse for Chinese intelligence. Ironically, Snowden’s leaks revealed that while Washington feared Huawei spying on Americans, the NSA had actually hacked into Huawei’s servers. A case of a thief fearing for his properties?

Perhaps the most explosive revelation in the book is how Huawei’s technology was allegedly used for surveillance in Africa. In one case, the African Union headquarters discovered that its servers, built by Huawei, had been secretly transmitting data to China every night between midnight and 2:00 a.m. This raises an unsettling question: how much control does Huawei really have over its own technology, and how much influence does the Chinese state wield behind the scenes?

And how did African countries, and much of emerging economies, react to these kinds of revelation? I will quote Mahathir Mohamad when he was Malaysian prime minister: “I’m quite sure for a long time, the CIA, for example, have been reporting on everything that is done in Malaysia and China. We did not carry out a boycott of America because of that. They have that capacity; now Huawei has got that capacity. Let them do their worst.”

LOL. In other words, whatever anyone wants to do with us, let them carry on. This might just be a matter of economic expediency for these countries.

While ‘House of Huawei’ is such a good deep dive into the company’s history, it leaves some areas underexplored. Most people know Huawei as a smartphone brand, yet the book barely discusses how it became the world’s top phone manufacturer before US sanctions crippled its ambitions. How did Huawei’s phones gain such a foothold? What were the internal strategies that led to their success? The book does not provide enough insight here. Thinking of what Chris Miller did to ‘Chip War’ and Steve Coll did to ‘Private Empire’, I salivate at what they would have done to this story had they been in charge.

Moreover, the lack of firsthand accounts from former Huawei employees is noticeable. Much of the narrative is pieced together from official reports and external perspectives. What do the engineers and sales teams who built the company think about its rise? Not much to be seen. While I understand that the curtain in China would have prevented many from speaking out, their lack of appearance takes away from the book.

Another quirk is the referencing system. If you are like me and went looking for the superscript numbers, only to find no footnotes or endnotes in the book, do not worry, you didn’t buy a fake version. The notes are only available on the book’s website. This is a frustrating choice. Academic rigor demands that sources be accessible within the book itself, not as an external online supplement. What informed this decision?

I will say though that his is an important book. Huawei is more than a company; it is a symbol of China’s growing technological power and the West’s unease about that rise. Whether you view Huawei as an innovator or an instrument of state control, one thing is clear: it is a company that cannot be ignored. In fact, the stories show that it is not a company that will go away anytime soon no matter how much pounding it gets from the West. In that sense, ‘House of Huawei’, released in January, is a book that should not be missed.