华为三十年，从青铜到王者_风闻

《外交政策》4月3日刊登地缘经济全球特派记者基思·约翰逊和特约撰稿人伊莱亚斯·格罗尔文章《华为崛起：化不可能为可能》

文：Keith Johnson & Elias Groll

译：周枝萍

2009年，瑞典手机巨头特里亚-索内拉电信（TeliaSonera）开始在斯堪的纳维亚半岛上一些最重要的、技术最先进的城市建设全球首批4G无线网络。在挪威奥斯陆的4G网络承建商选择上，特里亚做出了一个大胆而出人意料的决定：华为。当时的华为除了在国内和部分发展中国家以外，海外市场的业务并不多。

然而就在那一年，华为再次出人意料地拿下了一份更大的合同，全面重建并更新挪威的移动通信网络，而该网络最初是由全球通信行业领军者——瑞典的爱立信和芬兰的诺基亚——建造的。最终，这个来自中国的初生牛犊以低于预算的成本提前完成了世界上最雄心勃勃的网络升级任务。

在许多无线通信行的从业人士看来，这件事象征着华为和中国的成人礼。华为与其它靠压低定价或山寨技术来攫取市场份额的中国公司再也不可同日而语。仿佛忽然之间，华为作为一家自己掌握尖端技术的公司，硬是在爱立信、诺基亚等欧洲巨头的后院里挤出一片天地。

“那时人们第一次意识到，华为不仅价格低，关键是性价比具有竞争力,“惠誉解决方案公司（Fitch Solutions）的电信业分析师德克斯特·提利安说道。

时间回到现在。在不到十年的时间里，华为这家私人控股的企业发展成为了全球最大的电信设备商，公司去年在 170多个国家总营收超过1070亿美元。

更重要的是，各方均认为华为已经在第五代移动通讯技术（5G）的开发竞赛中取得了领先，而这是当今世界最重要的技术之一。与前几代移动通讯技术不同——它们仅仅赋予了让消费者发送短信、手机上网、快速播放视频的能力——而5G则预计将彻底颠覆全球经济。

随着华为的市场份额和技术实力日益增长，中国政府的 “冠军企业”终于获得了主导下一代技术的优势地位，这或许是中国现代史上头一次。5G带来的数据传输速度将远远超过现有的移动技术，这对消费者来说非常重要，但更重要的是，5G是人工智能无缝运行，无人汽车安全驾驶，世界各地自动工厂的机器可以完美的实时通信，以及地球上几乎所有设备全部实现互联互通的技术基础。

简而言之，5G将成为21世纪经济的中枢神经系统——如果华为继续崛起，那么最有可能主导世界经济的将是中国，而不是美国。

在此之前，世界经济主导权一向由发达国家垄断，华为令人惊愕的闯关能力不仅震撼了通信行业，也深深触动了西方国家的政府。华为的成功使其成为美国特朗普政府的目标。后者警告称，华为在全球电信网络中日益突出的角色可能使中国有能力借机控制全球数字通道，进而监视其竞争对手，或窃取对方的商业机密。

瑞典国际事务研究所（Swedish Institute of International Affairs）研究5G技术的蒂姆·鲁利格表示：“5G正在变成美国和中国之间的地缘政治战场”。

这便引出了一个有待回答关键的问题：华为到底为谁而工作？尽管华为以私有企业身份为豪，但1987年创立该公司的任正非曾经是解放军的工程兵，而且军队也是华为创业初期的重要客户。

上月底，英国5G监管机构发布的重要报告引发人们对华为可能成为高科技特洛伊木马的担忧。报告的结论是,“潜在的缺陷（underlying defects）”致使该公司软件和网络安全系统可能遭到黑客攻击，存在"重大"的安全隐患。但即便如此，这份报告主要归咎于工程设计上的疏忽，没有发现任何证据表明这些漏洞是在中国当局的指示下植入的；报告也没有建议英国完全禁掉华为。

实际上，经常疏远长期盟友的特朗普政府，已经在孤立华为的全球行动中步履蹒跚。尽管澳大利亚和日本等盟国已经在华盛顿方面的领导下对华为技术下了禁令，但许多其他国家仍在考虑之中。英国与德国一样，仍在权衡购买华为设备的地缘政治影响。泰国和韩国等其它国家已经先走一步，允许华为启动5G项目。作为一个美国指望用来制衡中国的大国，印度此次拒绝了美国将华为挡在电信网络之外的要求。

仿佛在一夜之间华为便占据了技术高地，西方的担忧背后有个直白的问题：这个30年前名不见经传，靠进口基础电信设备起家的中国私有企业，怎么就成了全世界关键技术的主宰呢？

华为的成功及其近年来的技术实力，不能用某个单一因素来解释。成本优势当然也是因素之一。国家支持，免受外来竞争冲击，以及庞大的本土市场，都有利于华为的巨额收入一再翻番。另外，华为创始人任正非是退伍老兵，而华为的首批客户就是军队，这恐怕不仅是巧合。

然而，华为的光速崛是许多不同政策和抉择相互作用的结果，西方竞争对手的若干失误也算是献上了助攻。

华为2018年营收已破千亿美元大关

有一点很明确：历年来华为所得到的国家支持，是西方竞争对手所享受不到的，尽管这种支持的确切性质很难量化。

由于华为是员工持股制的私有企业，它没有义务像上市公司那样公布详细的财务报告。但欧盟调查人员找到的证据显示，华为可能获得过中国国家开发银行提供的300亿美元信用额度，以及其它一些时机恰到好处的融资。

德国马歇尔基金会（German Marshall Fund）的“维护民主联盟（Alliance for Securing Democracy）”中国分析师马修·施拉德尔说:“国家支持的融资对华为的发展至关重要。” 这帮助华为控制了国内市场，进而使其有能力通过向海外市场提供大幅折扣来实现扩张。

华为否认接受了国家的直接援助。不过任正非一向坦言，中国产业政策在华为的成长中发挥了关键作用。他曾经表示，如果不是中国政府保护本土企业在国内市场上免受来自海外竞争的激烈冲击,“华为恐怕就不存在了。”

因此，华为的崛起或许可以被视为两种资本主义形式之间斗争的最新考验: 一种是开放的私有化的西方市场经济，另一种是政府支持的中国特色市场经济，不过这次意识形态分野并不那么清晰，因为华为并不是正式意义上的国有企业。

无论中国政府扮演什么角色，任正非的个人愿景和抱负显然对华为起到了塑造作用。2000年，《远东经济评论》在对华为公司的侧写中记载道：任正非39岁离开军队，在国企南油集团下面的一家电子公司工作了四年，后从一家国有银行拿到了850万美元贷款，和14名同事一起创办了华为。

他最初经营的是电信交换机代理业务，交换机是一种基本的网络技术。1990年，华为开始自产交换机，但他没有跟从行业的标准做法——与外国公司合作，而是下大力气对内投资进行自主研发。分析师纳撒尼尔•阿伦斯在研究华为业务记录后发现，上世纪90年代初，华为拥有500名研发人员和200名生产人员，这种严重“一边倒”的产研比例极不寻常。

到1993年，华为推出了新的交换机，并选择军队作为客户，为其架设电信网络。根据《远东经济评论》的报道，这份合同在华为超越竞争对手的过程中发挥了重要助力作用。一年后，任正非设法得到了另一种形式的政府保护。他在获得江泽民总书记接见时向其陈述，程控交换机关系到一个国家、一个民族的生存和发展的大问题，说它与国防一样重要，丝毫也不过分。这番见解得到了江的认同。

到了1996年，在任正非的推动下，中国政府改变产业政策使其偏向民族电信企业，将外国竞争对手挡在门外。

在接下来的几年里，华为火力全开，在全国范围内浩浩荡荡地扩张，与地方政府特别是农村基层政府部门签约，以超低的破盘价出售技术消灭竞争对手，有时甚至向政府机构提供免费服务。到1998年，华为的市场份额已经赶上了其主要竞争对手上海贝尔。

华为在国内崛起的同时，也通过比竞争对手提供更多折扣在国际市场上攻城略地。与西方竞争对手相比，华为拥有一大批愿意接受较低工资待遇的工程人才，节省的人力成本化作了面向客户高达20%的折扣。市场研究公司Dell’Oro Group提供的数据显示，华为如今控制着全球29%的电信设备市场，这个数字在亚太地区高达43%，在拉丁美洲达到34%。

尽管华为也有技术剽窃案的黑历史，如本世纪初窃取思科路由器软件代码一案，但专家们依然认为，正是因为任正非从创业伊始便高度重视研发，如今华为才会成长为研发巨头。

信号研究集团（Signals Research Group）创始人、行业分析师迈克·特兰德表示：“我认为，华为现在拥有很多技术专长的原因是他们汇聚了很多聪明人。你可以批评华为，但不可以全盘否定。”

如今，任正非认为作为私有企业，华为可以自由地投入更多的资金用于研发——这个数字约为每年150亿到200亿美元。在华为，约有8万人致力于研发工作，这差不多是公司的半数员工；仅在深圳的华为企业园区，就有数以万计的研发人员。

美国联邦通信委员会前首席技术专家亨宁•舒茨莱宁说，华为专注于将研究成果转化为市场产品，这样的能力与思科和谷歌相比有过之而无不及。舒茨莱宁表示，华为的研究机构"很好地融入开发过程”，使华为能够迅速将研究成果转化为销售额。

华为实行高度的垂直整合。与其主要竞争对手爱立信和诺基亚不同，华为几乎设计了5G技术的所有组成部分，包括互联网经济的核心技术：智能手机。华为是全球第二大智能手机制造商，仅次于韩国的三星。专家们认为，通过设计芯片组和生产配套的手机，华为可以更快地将5G产品推向市场。

在建设3G和4G网络时，华为还是一名追赶者，它向老牌竞争对手寻求获得许多技术授权。惠誉解决方案公司的提利安表示，华为当年的做法让今天同样逐鹿5G技术的爱立信和诺基亚多多少少出现了自满情绪。爱立信和诺基亚都在当时看来的尖端技术上投入了大量资金，所以只想着最大限度的挤出利润，而不是朝下一个阶段奋勇前进，这使得它们在开发上逐渐掉队。此外，他们当时也觉得没有必要担心一个毫无威胁的中国公司。

现在，情况发生了翻转。追踪知识产权业态的德国公司IPlytics的数据显示，华为现在拥有的5G相关专利比其他任何公司都多。这意味着未来其他公司要使用5G核心技术将不得不向华为支付费用。

全球主要5G相关专利拥有者（大陆地区企业/机构标红）

在掌握了技术武器之后，华为具备了制定5G发展规则的能力，这是它在前几代技术中无法获得的优势。

过去几年里，电信工程师们每隔几个月就会定期开会，敲定不断发展的技术标准，这些标准将管理5G的各个方面。根据IPlytics公司的调查，在这样的会议上处处可见华为的身影，它派出参会的工程师比其他任何电信公司都多，为仍在发展中的技术标准做出首屈一指的贡献。

在这个过程中，华为取得的技术突破是其他公司无法比拟。它的低频段（高覆盖）和高频段（高速度）5G技术已经通过了现场测试。今年早些时候，华为发布了自主设计的芯片组和设备，它们将使5G成为现实。华为表示，目前在全球各地已经签下了30份5G网络建设订单，还有几十份订单很快也可以拿下。

当来自全世界的海量数据——包括电话、电子邮件和商业交易等——通过一家中国公司搭建的网络进行传输时，美国官员担心这样的电信基础设施可能被用于间谍行动，使中国情报机构有机会收集大量通信信息。

令美国感到更忧虑的是，中国可能取代美国成为世界头号情报大国，甚至可能不给予美国网络准入权，而网络是全球商贸往来和军力投射的基础。几十年来，美国情报机构一直利用美国公司在全球电信网络中的核心角色来监视敌国手并收集重要情报。

如今，不管是计划还是巧合，抑或两者兼具，中国可能获得扭转劣势的办法，美国尽管有声名显赫的硅谷，却没有开发5G的“国家队”。反倒是欧洲电信公司通过整合与合并成为了西方世界主要的网络盒子、天线和波束形成设备制造商，而这些设备将成为5G技术的支柱。

全球主要5G标准贡献者（大陆地区企业/机构标红）

美国战略与国际研究中心（Center for Strategic and International Studies）的技术政策项目主任詹姆斯·刘易斯说：“如果你是中国政府，你有两个选择：你可以走美国的老路，花几十亿美元构建一个信号情报网络；也可以选择资助华为，这样做成本低得多。”

美国国家情报主任丹·科茨在《全球威胁评估报告》中警告称，外国生产的先进通信网络“将对美国的竞争力和数据安全构成挑战”，而且随着越来越多的美国数据在这些网络里流动，“外国侵入系统和拒绝服务的风险”将变得更高。

出于这方面的担忧，美国国内基本上已经禁用华为设备。去年12月，美国司法部以试图窃取美国技术并在伊朗业务上欺诈美国银行为名，下令逮捕华为首席财务官、任正非的女儿孟晚舟。目前她正在尽力反抗美国的引渡要求。

同时，美国还发狂般地让西方盟友保证禁用华为，这恐怕是一场必败之战。华为在全球电信网络建设和制定5G标准的竞争中已经处于主导地位，特朗普政府发现哪怕在最亲密的盟友之间美国也越来越遭到孤立。

尽管美方不断施压，欧盟仍然没有对这家中国公司下禁令，甚至连英国和德国这样与美国关系密切的盟友也不太可能完全禁用华为，这些国家尚未最终决定由哪些公司来参与建设它们的5G网络。原因很简单：许多欧洲国家的4G网络已经使用了华为设备，临阵换马的代价实在太高。

美国决策者尤其对德国施以高压，甚至警告柏林方面如果允许华为进入其5G网络，美国可能吊销其情报共享权。

“欧洲很像一个战场，而德国则是战场中的战场, ”惠誉解决方案公司的提利安表示。

然而从许多方面来看，特朗普政府都未能说服欧洲盟友相信华为会带来安全隐患，再加上他总是抨击欧洲国家领导人，使问题更加棘手。美国政府没有公开任何证明华为设备在中国间谍活动中发挥作用的证据，而它私下可能也没有拿出什么证据来。

德国马歇尔基金会的施拉德尔认为，如果美国情报官员真的掌握了确凿证据证明华为帮助中国开展间谍活动，可能会“主动凑上去”将其告知盟友。

随着美国的围剿行动露出败相，美国情报官员已经开始准备面对未来由华为主导新一代电信网络的世界。上个月，美国国家情报局首席副局长苏•戈登在在讲话中表示：“未来我们将不得不在5G世界中寻找出路，让我们能够在多样化的网络里管控不可信任的技术所带来的风险。你必须假设网络是肮脏的。”

华为高管们声辩指出，美国的指控是不负责任的，任正非表示即便中国法律要求华为收集情报，他也会拒绝以确保公司的独立性。美国的中国专家们认为这种说法很可笑。

施拉德尔表示：“在中国，一家公司的规模越大，就越需要使自身商业目标与党的政治目标保持一致。华为能够公开表达如此不符合实情的立场，这件事本身就佐证了它所拥有的政治支持。‘普通’企业如果表态说自己公然抗令，不可能不受责罚。”

为了满足执法需要，通信网络在搭建时一般都允许植入某种形势的监听功能，过去美国情报机构曾利用这种功能窃听电话和攫取数据。国际计算机研究所的高级研究员尼古拉斯·韦弗认为，如果美国网络采用中国设计的设备，等于是邀请北京方面开展间谍活动， “因为网络基础设施本身就支持这种干预行为。”

华为美国首席安全官安迪·珀迪在接受《外交政策》采访时指出，美国国家安全局的揭发者爱德华·斯诺登所记录的美国间谍活动导致电信行业爆发根本性信任危机。斯诺登披露的内情曝光了美国企业是如何被迫与政府合作支持其情报活动的。

“美国从根本上认为，中国会利用中国公司——甚至是私有公司——去从事美国利用美国公司进行的勾当,”珀迪说。

华为高管甚至开始用特朗普的“美国5G掉队论”来嘲讽美国。今年早些时候，华为轮值董事长郭平对记者说：“（特朗普）意识到美国在这方面落后了。我认为他的信息是清楚明白和正确无误的。”

与此同时，许多专家表示，针对华为设备的安全担忧被夸大了，因为几乎所有电信设备巨头都靠中国工厂大量生产零部件。

瑞典国际事务研究所的鲁利格表示：“目前关于华为安全问题的讨论有点愚蠢，没有抓住重点。我们应该假定，不管你使用华为还是其它厂家的设备，中国都可以攻破5G网络。禁用华为本身不会提供额外的安全保障。”

基于这样的想法，华为方面也要求美国政府重新审视其技术。珀迪提出：“我们应该探讨行之有效的风险降低机制，让我们有机会在美国做生意。”然而，美国政府尚未对这一提议做出回应。

相关领域专家们也在争论华为是否真的像某些美国官员担心的那样强大。某些曾经同时使用过华为和其他厂商设备的电信企业高管表示，华为确实处于行业领先位置，无线电数据传输方面的基本功尤其扎实。

“从技术角度来看，特别是在无线电接入网方面，我们认为华为拥有巨大优势，领先其他供应商好几年, ”西方某国运营全国移动网络的一名企业高管表示。

也有人认为，华为所谓的技术优势可能远没有那么突出，而且由于很多公司从不同的方向破解5G技术拼图，它们取得进步的领域不同，因此很难全面衡量技术优势。5G网络涉及许多不同的技术领域，其中许多仍处于初级发展阶段。专责工程小组尚未完全确定5G标准——也就是不同设备之间进行沟通和交换数据所使用的技术语言。这意味着当前缺乏科学标准来评价谁处于5G技术的领先地位。

“什么叫领先？我不知道你如何定义领先，”信号研究集团的特兰德说。

此前，移动通信技术从3G升级到4G，促生了以应用软件为基础的技术。向用户智能手机提供高保真内容的流媒体服务，比如YouTube和Spotify都依赖这项技术，Uber等网络打车服务也是如此。3G到4G的升级只是一种进化而不是革命；但5G尽管仍然依托于现有的蜂窝无线组网技术，却在数据传输量、速度和可靠性方面实现了突破。

未来的创新都需要数据传输速度和可靠性大幅提升，只有这样才会迎来技术公司高管们口中所说的“互联网革命的下一个阶段”。为了实现汽车自动驾驶，我们需要可靠的高带宽连接和几乎瞬时的数据传输，以便能够在毫秒内对路况变化作出反应。同样，人工智能的进步和机器学习也需要大量数据集才能正常运作。

不管华为领先同行一年也好，几个月也罢，还是大致处于相同水平，恐怕这些都不是问题关键所在。5G技术仍在研发之中，相关产品基本都要等到明年才会陆续面市；而真正在功能性上符合人们预期的5G网络可能至少要到2025年才会到来。

今天华为在重大新技术的标准制定上发挥领导作用，未来可能转化为动辄数十亿美元的许可费红利；而且随着各国争相建设5G网络，技术标准可能给华为带来优势。

瑞典国际事务研究所的鲁利格表示：“谁制定标准，谁就会夺取更高的市场份额。”华为在亚洲、非洲和中东的发展已经证明了这一点。“中国正在向发展中国家推广中国的技术标准，”他说。

事实上，随着各国争先恐后地着手建设先进的电信网络，尽管有美国阻挠但华为的地位已经日益稳固。许多亚洲国家，如马来西亚、越南，甚至美国的盟友泰国都在考虑让华为参与建设5G网络。美国的欧盟和北约盟友，如西班牙、葡萄牙、意大利和匈牙利也在进行类似的考虑，德国和英国也不太可能完全禁止华为。

近200年来，中国一直被动接受着其他国家开发的技术。今天，它正在以最令人瞩目的方式重返历史上曾经占据的技术领导地位。

The Improbable Rise of Huawei

A decade ago, in 2009, the Swedish phone giant Teliasonera set out to build one of the world’s first fourth-generation wireless networks in some of Scandinavia’s most important—and technologically savviest—cities. For Oslo, Norway, Teliasonera made an audacious and unexpected choice of who would build it: Huawei, a Chinese company with little presence outside China and some other developing markets.

The same year, Huawei landed an even bigger and more unexpected contract to completely rebuild and replace Norway’s mobile phone network, which had first been built by the global standard-bearers: Ericsson of Sweden and Nokia of Finland. The Chinese upstart eventually completed the world’s most ambitious network swap ahead of schedule and under budget.

To many in the wireless industry, it was a coming-of-age moment for Huawei, and for China. Huawei was no longer just another Chinese catch-up clawing out market share thanks to cut-rate pricing or thriving on stolen intellectual property. Suddenly it had cutting-edge technology of its own and was elbowing aside established European giants like Ericsson and Nokia in their own backyard.

“For the first time, people realized Huawei was not just the cheap option but could compete on quality and price,” said Dexter Thillien, a telecommunications analyst at Fitch Solutions.

Fast-forward to now. In less than a decade, allegedly thanks in part to billions of dollars in support from the Chinese government, the privately held Huawei has become the world’s largest telecom equipment company, last year posting more than $107 billion in revenue from operations in some 170 countries.

More important, Huawei has, by most accounts, taken the lead in the race to develop one of the modern world’s most important technologies: fifth-generation mobile telephony. Unlike its various predecessors, which simply offered consumers the ability to send texts, then to surf the web on their phones, and finally to stream video, 5G promises to revolutionize the entire global economy.

And for perhaps the first time in China’s modern history, Huawei’s growing market share and technological prowess are putting a champion of the Chinese government in a position to dominate a next-generation technology. 5G will offer hugely faster data speeds than today’s mobile technology, which is important for consumers. But 5G will also be the technology that ensures artificial intelligence functions seamlessly, that driverless cars don’t crash, that machines in automated factories can communicate flawlessly in real time around the world, and that nearly every device on earth will be wired together.

5G will be, simply put, the central nervous system of the 21st-century economy—and if Huawei continues its rise, then Beijing, not Washington, could be best placed to dominate it.

Huawei’s startling ability to gatecrash what has been until now an exclusive bastion of the developed world has sent shock waves not only through the industry but also through Western capitals. Its success has turned Huawei into a target for the U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration—which is warning that the company’s growing role in global telecommunications networks could enable Beijing to use its control of the world’s digital plumbing to spy on rival nations or steal their commercial secrets.

“5G is turning more into a geopolitical battleground between the United States and China,” said Tim Ruhlig of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, who researches 5G technologies.

And that raises a key question that remains unanswered: Who is Huawei really working for? While it prides itself on being a private company, Huawei was founded in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei, a veteran of the People’s Liberation Army’s engineering corps, and the Chinese army was an early and crucial customer for the fledgling firm.

Late last month, a critical report by Britain’s 5G watchdog also raised fears that Huawei might prove to be a high-tech Trojan horse. The report concluded that “underlying defects” left the company’s software and cybersecurity systems open to hackers, posing “significant” security issues. Even so, the report mainly blamed sloppy engineering and found no evidence that the vulnerabilities had been introduced at the direction of Chinese authorities; it also stopped short of proposing an outright ban.

Indeed the Trump administration—which has more often than not managed to alienate its longtime allies—is already faltering in its global campaign to isolate Huawei. While a few U.S. allies, such as Australia and Japan, have followed Washington’s lead and already banned Huawei technology, many others are still considering it. The United Kingdom, like Germany, is still weighing the geopolitical implications of purchasing Huawei equipment. Others such as Thailand and South Korea are pressing ahead and letting Huawei launch 5G projects. India, which the United States hopes to use as a counterweight to China, is resisting American calls to exclude Huawei from its networks.

And behind all these fresh worries over Huawei’s seemingly sudden dominance is a simpler question: How did a modest, private Chinese firm that started out three decades ago importing basic telecoms equipment emerge as the arbiter of what is arguably one of the world’s most important technologies?

There’s no single explanation that accounts for Huawei’s success or recent technical prowess. A cost advantage helped, of course. So did state backing, government protection from foreign competitors, and a huge local market, which led to massive and swiftly multiplying revenues. And it could hardly have been mere coincidence that Huawei’s founder, Ren, was a PLA veteran, and Huawei’s first customer proved to be the People’s Liberation Army.

In the end, however, Huawei’s meteoric rise was the result of a broad mix of different policies and decisions—helped along by a few missteps from its Western rivals.

One theme is clear: Throughout its history, Huawei appears to have benefited from state support not available to the company’s Western rivals, though the exact nature of that aid is difficult to quantify, as is the broader relationship of any private Chinese firm to the government.

Because the company is privately held through a complex employee ownership scheme, it doesn’t have the obligation to publish detailed financial reports as publicly listed firms do. But European investigators have found evidence that Huawei may have received a massive $30 billion line of credit from the China Development Bank, among other well-timed financing.

“State-backed finance was crucial in Huawei’s growth,” said Matthew Schrader, a China analyst at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund. It helped Huawei sew up the domestic market, which in turn enabled it to expand overseas by offering deep discounts.

Huawei denies receiving direct state aid. Nonetheless, Ren has been upfront about the importance of Chinese industrial policy as key to the company’s growth. Without Beijing’s policy of protecting Chinese companies from aggressive foreign competition at home, “Huawei would no longer exist,” Ren has said.

Huawei’s rise might thus be seen as the latest test in the struggle between two forms of capitalism: open, privatized Western markets versus state-assisted, Chinese-style ones, though this time with an ideological twist, as Huawei is not officially a state company.

Whatever the Chinese government’s role, Huawei was clearly shaped by Ren’s personal vision and ambition. After leaving the army at the age of 39 and working for a state-owned company, Shenzhen Electronics Corp., for four years, Ren secured an $8.5 million loan from a state bank and started Huawei on his own with 14 staffers, the Far Eastern Economic Review reported in a 2000 profile of the company.

He began as an importer of telecommunications switches, a basic networking technology. In 1990, the company started work on its first switch—but rather than partner with a foreign company, which was standard practice in the Chinese telecommunications industry at the time, Ren made massive investments in his company’s research and development wing to build his own products. In the early 1990s, the company is reported to have had 500 research and development staff and 200 working in production—a lopsided ratio—according to an examination of the company’s business history by the analyst Nathaniel Ahrens.

By 1993, the company released the new switch and picked up the army as a client, providing it with its own telecom network. That contract gave the company an important boost over its rivals, according to the Far Eastern Economic Review. A year later, Ren managed to secure another form of protection from the state. He met with Jiang Zemin, the Communist Party general secretary, and told him that a country without a domestic telecoms switch industry was like a country without a military. “Well said,” Jiang replied, according to Ren’s account of the meeting.

By 1996, under Ren’s prodding, the Chinese government shifted its industrial policy to favor domestic telecommunications companies, keeping foreign competitors out.

In subsequent years, a freed-up Huawei embarked on a ruthless campaign of domestic expansion, signing up local government clients, often in rural areas. The company sold its technology at rock-bottom prices to eliminate its rivals and sometimes even offered its services to government entities for free. By 1998, the company had matched the market share of its principal rival, Shanghai Bell, a foreign joint venture.

Throughout its rise to domestic dominance, Huawei has also thrived in international markets by offering its products at a significant discount compared to its competitors. Access to a huge pool of engineering talent willing to work for lower wages than Huawei’s Western competitors translates into discounts of up to 20 percent for customers. Today, Huawei controls 29 percent of the global telecom equipment market. In the Asia-Pacific region that figure is 43 percent, and in Latin America it’s 34 percent, according to figures provided by the Dell’Oro Group, a market research firm. 

And while Huawei’s history has been marred by several cases of technology theft—such as an infamous instance in the early 2000s of stealing Cisco code for router software—experts credit Ren with building Huawei into a research and development powerhouse from the company’s first days.

“I think a lot of their technical expertise as of late is because they have a lot of smart people,” said Mike Thelander, an industry analyst and the founder of the Signals Research Group. “You can say a lot of bad things about Huawei, but you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Today, Ren says that being a privately held company gives Huawei the freedom to plow more money back into R&D—some $15 billion to $20 billion per year. Some 80,000 people, or nearly half Huawei’s workforce, are dedicated to research and development; tens of thousands alone work at Huawei’s huge corporate campus in Shenzhen.

And in its focus on turning research into marketable products, Huawei compares favorably to Cisco and Google, said Henning Schulzrinne, the former chief technologist at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. The company’s research organization “is well integrated into the development process,” allowing Huawei to quickly turn research findings into sales, Schulzrinne said.

Huawei is also vertically integrated. Unlike its principal competitors, Sweden’s Ericsson and Finland’s Nokia, Huawei designs nearly every component of 5G technology, including the defining technology of the internet economy: the smartphone. The company is the second-largest maker of smartphones in the world, behind South Korea’s Samsung. By designing chipsets and the handsets they talk to, experts argue, Huawei may have an edge in getting 5G products to market more quickly.

When 3G and 4G networks were being built, Huawei was playing catch-up to its established rivals, licensing much of their technology. To some extent, that lured Ericsson and Nokia, which today are Huawei’s main rivals in the race to develop 5G, into a state of complacency, said Thillien of Fitch Solutions. They had invested a lot of money into what were then cutting-edge technologies and sought to squeeze the most they could out of them rather than racing ahead to the next stage, making their own developments obsolete. At the same time, they felt they had little to fear from what was then regarded as a nonthreatening Chinese firm.

Now, the situation is reversed. Huawei has more 5G-related patents than any other firm, according to IPlytics, a German-based company that tracks intellectual property development. That means other companies will have to pay Huawei to use key bits of 5G technology.

Partly as a result of that technological arsenal, Huawei has been able to shape the rules of the road for 5G in a way it never could with earlier mobile technologies.

Over the past few years, telecoms engineers have regularly gathered every few months to hash out the evolving technical standards that will govern all aspects of 5G. And Huawei has simply flooded the zone, sending more engineers to those meetings than any other telecoms company and making more technical contributions to the still-evolving standard than anyone else, IPlytics found.

Along the way, Huawei has notched an ever-growing tally of technical breakthroughs that no other single company has matched. It has field-tested its 5G technology in lower frequencies (good for coverage) and higher frequencies (better for high data speeds). Earlier this year, it debuted its own, in-house-designed chipset and devices that will make 5G a reality. Huawei says it currently has 30 contracts to build 5G networks around the world, with dozens of other countries close to signing on.

With a Chinese company building the network through which huge volumes of data—phone calls, emails, and business transactions—will flow across the globe, U.S. officials fear that infrastructure could be subverted for espionage, allowing Beijing’s intelligence agencies to gather huge volumes of communications.

Even more dire, Washington fears that Beijing will replace it as the world’s premier intelligence power and perhaps even deny it access to the networks that make global commerce and the projection of military power possible. For decades, U.S. intelligence agencies have capitalized on the central role of U.S. companies in global telecommunications networks to spy on adversaries and gather crucial intelligence.

And now, whether by design or luck or some combination of the two, the Chinese Communist Party may have the means to overturn that disadvantage—especially because the United States itself, despite the prominence of Silicon Valley, doesn’t have a national champion of its own developing 5G. Consolidation and mergers in the telecommunications industry have made European, not American, companies the leading Western makers of the boxes, antennas, and beam-generating equipment that will serve as the backbone of 5G technology.

“If you’re the government of China, you have a couple of choices: You can duplicate what the U.S. did and build a multibillion-dollar signals intelligence network, or you can fund Huawei—and that’s a lot cheaper,” said James Lewis, the director of the Technology Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Foreign production of advanced communication networks “will challenge U.S. competitiveness and data security,” and as American data increasingly flows across those networks, that will increase “the risk of foreign access and denial of service,” Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, warned in his annual assessment of threats facing the United States.

As a result of these fears, Washington has essentially banned Huawei equipment inside the United States. Last December, the Justice Department also ordered the arrest of MengWanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and Ren’s daughter, on charges of trying to steal American technology and lying about the company’s business in Iran. She is currently fighting extradition to the United States from Canada.

But Washington may be fighting a losing battle in frantically trying to get its Western allies to swear off Huawei as well. So dominant has Huawei already become in building telecom networks globally and vying to set the world standard for 5G that the Trump administration finds itself somewhat isolated, even among its closest allies.

Despite U.S. pressure, the European Union has opted against barring the Chinese firm, and even close U.S. allies such as Britain and Germany, which are still deciding which companies will participate in building their 5G networks, are unlikely to ban Huawei altogether. The reason is simple: For many European countries that already use Huawei equipment in their 4G networks, it would be costly to switch horses in midstream.

U.S. policymakers have leaned especially hard on Germany, even warning Berlin it could lose access to U.S. intelligence sharing if it includes Huawei in its network.

“Europe is very much a battleground, and Germany is a battleground within the battleground,” said Thillien of Fitch Solutions.

Yet the Trump administration has done a poor job, by most accounts, of convincing European allies of the security risk posed by the company—a problem exacerbated by the president’s constant sniping at his counterparts across the Atlantic. Washington has never publicly presented evidence backing up its assertions that Huawei equipment plays a role in Chinese espionage operations, and there are doubts that it has shared much evidence in private either.

According to Schrader of the German Marshall Fund, if U.S. intelligence officials truly had clear evidence that Huawei was helping China to spy, they would be more “forward leaning” in sharing that information with allies.

With the American campaign faltering, U.S. intelligence officials are already beginning to prepare for a world in which Huawei dominates next-generation telecommunications networks. “We are going to have to figure out a way in a 5G world that we’re able to manage the risks in a diverse network that includes technology that we can’t trust,” saidSue Gordon, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, in remarks last month. “You have to presume a dirty network.”

Huawei executives argue the U.S. allegations are irresponsible, and the company’s founder has said he would defy Chinese law on intelligence gathering to maintain his company’s independence. It is a claim China experts find laughable.

“The bigger a company in China gets, the more it needs to align its business goals with the party’s political goals,” said Schrader. “The mere fact that Huawei is able to publicly take a position so at odds with the actual reality of China speaks to the degree of party support it enjoys. ‘Normal’ businesses in China cannot get away with saying they don’t abide by party dictates.”

To satisfy the demands of law enforcement, telecommunications networks are typically built to enable some type of wiretapping function. Such abilities have in the past been subverted by intelligence agencies to snoop on calls and scoop up data, so using Chinese-designed equipment for such networks practically represents an invitation to Beijing to spy, “since the infrastructure itself is designed to support such meddling,” argued Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute.

In an interview with Foreign Policy, Andy Purdy, Huawei’s chief security officer in the United States, pointed out that U.S. espionage activities documented by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden have created a fundamental attitude of distrust in the telecommunications industry. The Snowden disclosures exposed how American companies were forced to cooperate with U.S. intelligence activities.

“The U.S. fundamentally believes that China would use Chinese companies—even private ones—for the same kinds of things that the U.S. uses American companies for,” Purdy said.

Huawei executives have even begun to taunt Washington over Trump’s warnings that the United States is falling behind in 5G technology. “The U.S. is lagging behind,” Huawei rotating chairman Guo Ping told reporters earlier this year. “His message is clear and correct.”

At the same time, many experts say security fears singling out Huawei equipment are overblown, as nearly all the big telecom equipment makers use Chinese factories to churn out their components.

“The whole Huawei security discussion as it is now is kind of silly and misses the point,” said Ruhlig of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. “It’s fair to assume that China could hack into 5G anyway, whether you have Huawei equipment in place” or that of another manufacturer, he said. “Banning Huawei will not by itself provide additional security.”

That line of thinking has Huawei officials asking Washington to have another look at its technology. “Let’s talk about proven risk mitigation mechanisms so that we can have a chance to do business in the United States,” Purdy said. The U.S. government, however, has yet to respond to that overture.

Experts are also still debating whether Huawei is as dominant as some officials in Washington fear. Some telecoms executives with experience operating Huawei alongside equipment made by other manufacturers say that it has established the lead, especially in the bread-and-butter technology of transmitting large amounts of data through radio networks.

“From a technology point of view, our view is that specifically in [radio access networks] we see Huawei with a big advantage, a couple of years ahead of any other provider,” said one Western executive who operates a major national mobile network.

Others say Huawei’s purported technical lead may be much smaller, and in any event is hard to measure when so many companies are making progress in different pieces of the 5G puzzle. 5G networks are made up of many different technologies, many of which remain in a nascent stage of development. Engineering task forces are still determining the standards—the technical language different devices will use to talk to one another and exchange data. That means determining who is ahead in the market is more art than science.

“What is meant by being ahead?” said Thelander of the Signals Research Group. “I’m not sure how you define being ahead.”

The previous shift in mobile communications technology—from 3G to 4G and beyond—powered the creation of the current app-based technology. Streaming services such as YouTube and Spotify, which deliver high-fidelity content into users’ smartphones, rely on the technology, as do networked car-hailing services such as Uber. But that transition was more an evolution than a revolution; 5G, while building on existing cellular technologies, represents a breakthrough in the amount of data that can be transmitted, and especially its speed and reliability.

These improvements in speed and reliability are required for the kinds of innovations that technology executives tout as the next phase of the internet revolution. For self-driving cars to become a reality, they will require reliable high-bandwidth connections and near-instantaneous data transmission to be able to react to changing road conditions in milliseconds. Advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning likewise require huge datasets to function as intended.

​

And whether Huawei is a year ahead of its peers, or a few months ahead, or roughly at the same level may not be the biggest question. 5G is still being developed, and commercial rollout in a limited fashion won’t begin in earnest until next year; the first true 5G networks, which will deliver all the whiz-bang features the technology promises, probably won’t arrive until 2025 at the earliest.

Huawei’s leading role in shaping the most important new technology standard will likely pay dividends in terms of billions of dollars in license fees and could give the Chinese firm an advantage as countries around the world scramble to build 5G networks.

“Whoever sets the standard is going to grab higher market share,” said Ruhlig of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. That’s already on display in parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, where Huawei rules. “In the developing world, China is internationalizing Chinese technology standards,” he said.

Indeed, as countries around the world scramble to start building advanced telecoms networks, and despite the U.S. campaign against the company,Huawei is becoming an even more entrenched player. Asian countries including Malaysia, Vietnam, and U.S. ally Thailand are all considering Huawei for their 5G networks. So are European and NATO allies of the United States such as Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Hungary, while Germany and the United Kingdom are unlikely to ban it altogether.

For almost 200 years, China has largely been on the receiving end of technology developed elsewhere. Today, it is reasserting, in the most demonstrable way, the technological leadership it enjoyed long ago.

(End)