House of Huawei

House of Huawei: Inside the Secret World of China’s Most Powerful Company (by Eva Dou, 2025)

The subtitle made it seem this would be a China-panic book about the evils of Chinese companies, but Eva Dou writes a much more nuanced book investigating how Huawei went from selling then manufacturing telephone branch exchange switches in the early 1990s to the leading suppliers of telecommunications equipment in the world by 2012–and then to target of Western sanctions and prosecutions.

There is a slight disappointment in the fact that, despite Dou’s excellent reporting, founder Ren Zhengfei 任正非 and his family remain somewhat opaque characters. Ren believes in hard work and undercutting his competitors, but there is little evidence of him being an ultra-nationalist plotter for Chinese global dominance. He is more likely, it seems to me, to be a keen capitalist who has managed to thread the needle of running of globally-successful private company headquartered in a country firmly controlled by the CCP. The European-style Ox Horn Campus in Dongguan and his younger daughter’s (Annabel Yao 姚安娜) Harvard education and attendance at a Parisian debutante ball point only to a tawdry ultra-wealthy cosmopolitanism.

Nevertheless, this book lays out all the evidence available for you to make your own decision about whether Huawei is friend, foe, or just another big tech company simply looking for profit. ★★★★☆