From the Gelber Prize jury
The House of Huawei is a history of a company, at times a biography of its founder, Ren Zhengfei, and, at the same time, the story of contemporary China. Eva Dou deftly weaves together the history of telecommunications technology with domestic and global politics, taking readers inside decision-making in Beijing, Washington, London, and beyond. Global in scope, the book traces Huawei’s operations across the Middle East and Africa and shows how the firm has often functioned as an extension of the Chinese state. Drawing on remarkable sources, which include internal Huawei records, this is a rare, revealing, and utterly compelling page-turner.
From the publisher Portfolio
The untold story of the mysterious company that shook the world.On the coast of southern China, an eccentric entrepreneur spent three decades steadily building an obscure telecom company into one of the world’s most powerful technological empires with hardly anyone noticing. This all changed in December 2018, when the detention of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies’ female scion, sparked an international hostage standoff, poured fuel on the US-China trade war, and suddenly thrust the mysterious company into the global spotlight.
In House of Huawei, Washington Post technology reporter Eva Dou pieces together a remarkable portrait of Huawei’s reclusive founder, Ren Zhengfei, and how he built a sprawling corporate empire—one whose rise Western policymakers have become increasingly obsessed with halting. Based on wide-ranging interviews and painstaking archival research, House of Huawei dissects the global web of power, money, influence, surveillance, bloodshed, and national glory that Huawei helped to build—and that has also ensnared it.
