Huawei, which roughly translated means “a splendid act”, was founded by Ren Zhengfei, a former deputy director of the People’s Liberation Army, in 1987 in Shenzhen, China. Rather than rely on joint ventures to secure technology transfers from foreign companies, which were often reluctant to transfer their most advanced technologies to Chinese firms, Ren looked to reverse engineer foreign technologies with local researchers. At a time when all of China’s telecommunications technology was imported, Ren hoped to build a domestic Chinese telecommunication company that could compete with, and perhaps one day even replace, foreign competitors.
Officials and politicians within the U.S. federal government have raised concerns that Huawei-made telecommunications equipment may be designed to allow unauthorised access by the Chinese government and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army since founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei, served as an engineer in the army in the early 1980s. In a 2011 open letter, Huawei stated that the security concerns are “unfounded and unproven” and called on the U.S. government to investigate any aspect of its business.
Several major U.S. wireless carriers, as well as consumer electronics giant Best Buy, began to drop Huawei’s products in early-2018, prompting Huawei to pull out of the market entirely. The company has argued that its products posed “no greater cybersecurity risk” than those of any other vendor and that there is no evidence of the U.S. spying claim.