The might of Huawei

I was gripped by Brett Christophers' review in The Nation, of Eva Dou's book, House of Huawei: The Secret History fo China's Most Powerful Company.

Huawei has been caught in the cross-hairs of US-China relations. Despite the US hostility towards Huawei, the company is an unmitigated success whose main business "is the design, manufacture, and sale of telecom equipment such as networking infrastructure and the provision of ancillary services."

Huawei has succeeded internationally despite America’s best efforts, especially in the past decade, to prevent it from doing so. The company had been on Washington’s radar since the late 1990s, not least because of its expansion in those years into markets presided over by what the US deemed “rogue” regimes, among them Iraq and Russia. The result was that, even after Huawei successfully made big sales in other Western territories after establishing its foothold in Britain, America would remain the one major market in which it failed to make significant inroads, having to satisfy itself there with sales to second- or third-tier network operators. As a potential supplier, the Chinese company was simply beyond the pale for America’s telephony market leaders, for whom political optics and relationships are considered just as important as capital costs and network quality.

Tightening the squeeze on Huawei:

During the first Trump administration, the US expanded its campaign against Huawei on two new fronts. It imposed export controls, specifically by banning US companies from supplying Huawei with critical components, as they had been doing since as early as 1993, when Huawei established its first US subsidiary in California. And, with some notable successes, the US government also began applying substantial pressure on countries like Australia, Britain, and Canada to follow its lead in blackballing Huawei in their domestic markets, focusing on those countries’ tendering of contracts to build 5G networks. Huawei, however, has prevailed nonetheless, even as there is no doubt that America’s resistance has crimped the scope of its achievements. “The West was continuing to grow more inhospitable toward Huawei,” Dou says by way of bringing her story up to the time of her writing, in 2024. “Yet—almost incredibly—Huawei was still number one in the world in 5G gear sales.”

Huawei’s prevailing in the face of the United States’ concerted opposition shows that America is not as powerful or persuasive as it certainly likes to imagine that it is: Not everyone, even its (erstwhile) “friends,” kowtows to its demands. Furthermore, and perhaps more significantly still, the Huawei story demonstrates that in the 21st century, non-Western companies are able to be enormous commercial successes—to be, in fact, world leaders in their chosen industry sectors—while having the US and several other leading Western markets essentially closed off to them. That, in itself, is a profound statement on the shifting of the world economic order, and one that Trump and his cronies evidently seem to be ignoring—or perhaps are unable to understand—as they set about alienating long-time commercial and political allies, in addition to the list of long-time adversaries, by unleashing an all-encompassing trade war the likes of which the world has not seen since the early 20th century. In the postwar era, it would have been unthinkable that a company could have ascended to global market leadership in any area of the economy without a major presence in the United States, Europe, or (more likely) both. That is no longer true. Alongside East Asia and Africa, it is the Middle East, with all its natural-resource-based riches, that represents, in Dou’s words, “the beating heart of Huawei’s global empire.”

It's a long but worthwhile read.

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