Do Your Own Research: The Chinese Company That Terrifies the West w/ Eva Dou

Richard Hames (0:00)

Welcome to the second series of Do Your Own Research, the show that maps everything in the world that has ever mattered, and everything that ever will.

This series is entirely about China, the most interesting place in the world. But first, I want to take you somewhere very different. In 2001, before 9-11, the UK and the US bombed Iraq.

The target, they said, was a network of Iraqi military sites that contained fibre optics being built by Huawei. That's the same Huawei that makes consumer tech from phones to laptops to the software that goes in cars. The UK and the US said that Huawei was building a network that would allow the Iraqi military to communicate more effectively using fibre optics. And that would make it more difficult for the US to monitor those communications. The episode is contested, but it prompts a lot of questions. What was Huawei, which is a Chinese company, doing in Iraq in the era of Saddam Hussein? Huawei and Beijing denied helping the Iraqi military, and they might not even have been aware of what was happening. But all that tells us is that this technology, the communication cables and pipes that deliver information from point A to point B, has such a bewildering variety of uses from civilian and military, that they may well be the most important technology in the world. And these civilian and military uses sometimes blur together. And that's not even the strangest episode in the history of Huawei, a company that I think we have to understand if we want to get to grips with the technological and political powers of modern China. My guest this week is Eva Dou. She is a reporter for The Washington Post and the author of The House of Huawei, the Secret History of China's Most Powerful Company. It came out last year and posed some essential questions about the relationship between the Chinese state and private companies. What is the relationship between Huawei and the Chinese intelligence services? But after all, don't all global telecoms providers give their data to someone? My name is Richard Hames. Come with me through this whole series as we explore the myths, the realities and the promise of China in our increasingly Chinese century. As always, with Do Your Own Research, I'll be adding the peoples, places, technologies, events and ideas that define our world to our map. If you're listening to the audio version, you can find that anytime at novaramedia.com/d-y-o-r.

Let us know in the comments what connections you find in your own research. But for now, Eva Dou. Welcome to Do Your Own Research.

So this second series of Do Your Own Research is all about China. We're going to go through the whole history of modern China, at least from the British Empire to the First Opium War, the Taiping Rebellion, the Xinhai Republican Revolution, the Warlord Era, and eventually, of course, onto the Mao Era, the Chinese Communist Revolution, through the Great Leap Forward, through the Cultural Revolution. And our story begins, at least in this episode, with a company that emerges in what we might broadly think of as sort of the Deng era, but its story goes a bit further back than that into the Cultural Revolution with its very enigmatic founder. And that company is, as your subtitle says, the most important company in China, Huawei. But instead of telling that story in linear fashion, I want to start with something that's happening right now, which is that Huawei is on trial in the US, in Brooklyn in particular, but it's a kind of federal trial.

What is alleged?

Eva Dou (4:05)

So Huawei is finally on trial in the US. This is a case that began under the first Trump administration and has continued on for many years since then. And so what's alleged? There's a range of allegations from intellectual property theft, to racketeering, to circumventing sanctions to do business in Iran.

And so these all originally were two different cases that have now been sort of put together.

Richard Hames (4:40)

So the two cases were the one about circumventing sanctions in Iran and then also the intellectual property theft, which I think is probably what Huawei is most famous for being accused of. Whose property did it steal, allegedly?

Eva Dou (4:55)

Yeah, a number of Western companies are named in this case. For US companies, there's Cisco, Motorola. There's also Nortel, the Canadian company.

So these are all Huawei's competitors. And from Huawei's perspective, they'll say that they are just sharp elbowed competitors. And from US prosecutors, they are alleging like an organized attempt, successful attempts to steal the intellectual property of these companies.

Richard Hames (5:29)