Chinese telecom equipment giant Huawei Technologies Co (華為) yesterday gave foreign media a peek into its state-of-the-art facilities as the normally secretive company steps up a counteroffensive against US warnings that it could be used by Beijing for espionage and sabotage.
Huawei has started this year with an aggressive public relations campaign that has seen reclusive founder Ren Zhengfei (任正非) give a series of interviews with foreign media to deny the company is a threat, while executives have dismissed the US warnings as baseless.
The charm offensive went into another gear yesterday as Huawei welcomed media to its tightly guarded facilities in Guangdong Province.
“I don’t think this is any change in their DNA so much as a Beijing communist-style ‘we are going to pound you into submission,’” Christopher Balding, a China expert at Fulbright University Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City, told Agence France-Presse.
Journalists toured a huge factory floor with 35 highly automated assembly lines in Dongguan, where an array of robotic arms put together a Huawei P20 smartphone every 28.5 seconds.
Reporters were then taken past rows of mammoth buildings to the Huawei Independent Cyber Security Laboratory, whose director, Wang Jin, rejected fears that the company could serve as a Trojan horse for Chinese authorities.
“Our most basic red line is that our products cannot have any back doors,” Wang said.
Foreign journalist visits are hardly routine at a headquarters where high-tech labs and manufacturing facilities employ 60,000 people, but these are unusual times for the company.
The US has said that Huawei equipment could be manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party government to spy on other countries and disrupt critical communications.
Washington is urging governments to shun the company just as the world readies for the advent of ultra-fast 5G telecommunications, an advancement that Huawei was expected to lead and which would allow wide adoption of next-generation technologies such as artificial intelligence.
Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟), Ren’s daughter, yesterday faced a court hearing in Vancouver, Canada, on a US extradition request.
Two Canadians have been detained in China in suspected retaliation over her arrest.
During the tour, journalists were served coffee in cups featuring an image of a lighthouse and the words: “Lighting the way home for Meng.”
The US Department of Justice has accused Huawei and Meng of circumventing US sanctions against Iran.
Two affiliates also have been charged with stealing trade secrets from telecommunications group T-Mobile International AG.
“They should be able to ride this out,” Balding said. “It’s not realistic to expect the entire world to shun Huawei and that probably wouldn’t be good anyway.”
Founded by Ren in 1987, Huawei has espoused a relentless “wolf” ethos that executives have said fueled its rise to become the world leader in telecom network hardware.
It remains to be seen how the new charm offensive will play out, but the wolf might already smell blood.
Following intense lobbying by Huawei, reports have suggested that Britain and New Zealand might walk back earlier indications that the company would be frozen out of their telecom plans.
At the GSMA Mobile World Congress, the world’s top mobile industry fair, in Spain last week, Huawei bagged 5G commercial contracts or partnership agreements with 10 telecoms — including Switzerland’s Sunrise Communications AG, Iceland’s Nova, Saudi Telecom Co and Turkey’s Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri AS.
Huawei chairman Guo Ping (郭平) is today to hold a news conference at the company’s headquarters in Shenzhen that might be the real reason for the media tour’s timing.
The New York Times on Monday cited anonymous sources as saying that Huawei is to announce plans to sue the US government for barring US federal agencies from using the company’s products.
The topic of the news conference has not been disclosed, but a big announcement would allow Huawei to seize back the narrative from Meng’s extradition hearing.
Huawei declined to comment publicly on the New York Times report.
Opening its sprawling grounds is also a chance for Huawei to show that it is a global player not to be trifled with.
Its Shenzhen headquarters — near Dongguan — has cutting-edge laboratories, hotels, swimming pools and fitness centers, a dozen cafeterias and a university, where it trains staff, as well as foreign customers and partners.
Huawei strenuously denies any connections to China’s government.
However, skeptics have said that it is highly unlikely that Ren, a former Chinese army engineer, could have steered his company to such heights in such a strategic sector without the support of Beijing, which has clearly stated its goal of becoming the world’s high-tech leader.
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