House of Huawei
The Secret History of China's Most Powerful Company
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4.6 • 16 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
“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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Washington Post journalist Dou debuts with a probing history of the Huawei Technologies Company's rise from telephone switch–maker to preeminent global purveyor of digital networking equipment, smart phones, and surveillance systems. Her narrative centers on Huawei's aphorism-spouting founder Ren Zhengfei, who demanded maniacal overwork (leading to a rash of executive suicides) and a "wolf culture" among the company's salespeople (causing them to frequently resort to bribery to get contracts). Huawei also benefited, Dou contends, from the Chinese government's preferential treatment, with government-backed loans and diplomatic support abroad. (Chinese officials threatened to cut off aid to Kenya when the Kenyan government tried to cancel a contract with Huawei.) Huawei has also been accused of putting "back doors" in its software for Chinese intelligence agencies (leading Western countries to ban Huawei from building 5G networks or buying advanced chip technology) and of selling surveillance systems that monitor and censor dissidents to foreign governments (including Iran, in violation of U.S. sanctions, leading to the 2018 arrest of Zhengfei's daughter in Canada). Dou's account revealss that Huawei's corporate skullduggery was typical for both Chinese business culture and the global digital sector. (The U.S. government knew that Chinese intelligence agencies could hack into Huawei networks to spy on people because the NSA hacked into them to do the same.) This casts a shrewd spotlight on a global technology sector where everyone seems to be spying on everything.
Customer Reviews
Five stars without hesitation
What impressed me most was the way Dou presents the complexities of Huawei’s journey without oversimplifying. The book is meticulously researched, full of compelling anecdotes, and paints a vivid picture of the personalities and decisions that shaped Huawei’s trajectory.