Tech Won't Save Us - The Geopolitical Fight Over Huawei w/ Yangyang Cheng

Episode Date: July 3, 2025

Paris Marx is joined by Yangyang Cheng to discuss how Huawei became one of the most powerful companies in China and how current geopolitical narratives distract from the issues at the heart of surveillance capitalism in the US and China.Yangyang Cheng is a Research Scholar in Law and Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson.Also mentioned in this episode:Yangyang wrote about how Huawei is emblematic of China’s capitalist model for China File.We also discuss Eva Dou’s The House of Huawei.Donald Trump discussed how the USA uses the same tactics the government accuses China of employing in bad faith.Support the show

It's the people, the workers, the consumers in both countries and around the world that are being exploited by corporate interests and by national security interests. And I think that is part of the sadness that these techno-nationalistic and state capitalist rhetoric are foreclosing the political and moral imagination in terms of thinking about what are these communications technologies actually for? Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host Paris Marks and this week my guest is Yangyang Cheng. Yangyang is a research scholar in law and a fellow at the Yale Law School's Palzai China Center.

Now Yangyang has been on the show in the past but I wanted to have her back because we talk a lot about these major American tech companies, right? The Amazons, the Apples, but we don't talk nearly enough on the show about these major American tech companies, right? The Amazons, the Apples, but we don't talk nearly enough on the show about these major Chinese tech companies, which are not just global firms in their own right, but have increasingly been drawn into this geopolitical battle between the United States and China, which means that we should have a much greater understanding

of what they are, what they do, where they come from. And that's why this week I wanted to discuss Huawei, which is a company that you might know from, you know, it's phones and tablets and things like that, if you're in a market where those are sold, but it's actually a major telecommunications company in the sense that it makes a lot of the kind of switches and underlying hardware that allows us to communicate

with one another around the world. At this point, it's one of the four dominant firms creating these kinds of technologies. Huawei and ZTE are the Chinese ones, and then you have Nokia and Ericsson in Europe, and those four companies are kind of the major players in this space now. There's a new book out recently from Eva Du

called The House of Huawei, which I'm in the process of reading and am finding really fascinating to learn in the process of reading and finding really fascinating to learn about the history of this company. And then I read a review that Yang Yang had written of the book itself that kind of drew in some of these perspectives that are certainly in line with those of the show in how we approach technology. And so I thought it was a good opportunity to not just discuss Huawei, but to discuss how it fits into this geopolitical battle and how it also reveals some of those hypocrisies of the United States when it accuses China and Chinese companies of potentially spying,

but then actually engages in a lot of those things itself as well. And part of its reasoning for wanting to limit the global scale and ambition of Chinese companies is so that companies that are more aligned with its security apparatus are the ones that are still dominating these telecommunications spaces and thus letting it in to be able to surveil communications around the world. It was actually funny on this point after we had recorded this interview, Donald Trump gave an interview to Fox News over the final weekend of June,

where he was essentially asked about China hacking into telecom systems, stealing intellectual property, all of these sorts of things, and saying, like, how can we negotiate with such a bad actor? And Trump just very matter-of-factly said, you don't think we do that to them?

We do, we do a lot of things. That's the way the world works. It's a nasty world. And while there are so many things that I hate about Donald Trump, it is interesting the moments where he's just very honest about the fact that the United States engages in all of this skullduggery that it says only the most nefarious countries in the world, its enemies, of course, are up to. So I think that this is a really fascinating conversation with Yang Yang where we learn more about Huawei itself. Certainly there is so much more that we could have gotten into in this conversation because there's so much to be said about this company that can't really

fit into one, you know, 50 minute episode of a podcast, but I do hope you enjoy it. I do hope it helps to fill you in on this history. Obviously in the show notes, I'll put a link to Yang Yang's review, but also Eva Dao's new book, if you do wanna check that out. If you do enjoy our conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can also share the show on social media

or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do wanna support the work that goes into making tech won't save us every single week, so we can keep having these critical in-depth conversations that are increasingly taking a more international focus as we seek to understand more of this wider world and the impacts of this tech industry. You can join supporters like Laura from Durham, North Carolina, Solomon from Brooklyn, Eb in Glasgow, Scotland, Charlotte in Halifax, Braden in San Francisco, Colin in Sunderland,

and Mallory from Renfrew, Ontario by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Yang Yang, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to talk to you again. Obviously, you know, discussing China is always something that I want to do more on the show and I often don't get to as much as I think would be interesting, especially because of, you know, how important China and Chinese technology is in the discussions that we're increasingly having about this industry and the wider world that we live in. I wanted to have you back on the show because you wrote

this really fascinating piece, basically reviewing a new book about Huawei. This is one of the really important Chinese tech companies and especially one that has been brought into these broader geopolitical debates between China and the United States or China and the West more broadly. I thought that this would be something really interesting for us to dig into, to not just understand the company, but this broader geopolitical debate even better. I was thinking just to start for people who might not be so familiar with this company, could you talk to us about what Huawei actually is, what this company does and you know its significance within the Chinese technology landscape? Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. And it is really interesting because for someone of my generation, I think when I first heard about Huawei was in the mid or late 2000s when I was in college and it was like, oh, there were schoolmates who went to work

at this big Chinese telecom company, but it wasn't considered particularly prestigious or glamorous. It was just like a job. And so it was really interesting to see how a decade on, it became pushed into this geopolitical spotlight on one hand and becoming this national champion on the other. However, the company itself actually had a rather humble beginning. So it was founded in 1987 by this former Chinese soldier by the name of Ren Zhengfei in the city of Shenzhen on the southern coast, just across the border from Hong Kong. And so it was as part of China's

earlier transitions from a collective economy to embrace the capitalist market. And so one could really see the four decades of Huawei's development as a way to mirror these four decades of China's development, both in terms of its transition to embrace a capitalist market and its rise in the global capitalist hierarchy. And Huawei started and entered the telecom market in the very beginning, partly on as Ren Zhengfei himself would say out of Navite because that was seen as an open and lucrative market because of scarce phone coverage in China. It had faced fierce competition within China itself.

So its main business at the beginning and even now is producing telecom equipment like these phone switches and these kind of not particularly glamorous things. And they started as a subcontractor, like assembly products for other companies. But one of the things that really distinguished Huawei and Ren Junfei's business approach from the very beginning is part of its ambition and its emphasis on research and development that Ren did really want Huawei to have its own technology that is seen as a way for the company to achieve longevity, not just short-term profit. And so it developed its own phone switch that received Chinese state approval

in the mid-1990s, but it was still a rather humble company at that point through the 1990s. And partly because of the fierce domestic competition, another thing that did distinguish Huawei was that they ventured overseas rather early on. And that was partly also because of a business decision that the domestic competition was really fierce and venturing overseas was seen as a way that was essential for the company's survival. So it was partly out of these bold business decisions and partly was also that it had reliable and good communications technology that it developed. And so up until the early 2000s, Huawei had stood out as one of the leading telecom companies in China,

and it was starting to establish, make a name for itself in overseas markets as well. And then around 2010, that was when Huawei entered the smartphone business. And that was when this public profile probably raised that it was no longer being seen as only this bulky outdated company, not outdated, but in terms of just

not very glamorous. But then we entered the smartphone business and had got like Scarlett Johansson made one of its ads. It was being really branding itself as one of the hip tech firms that is also branding itself to both a younger generation of customers and the overseas market. Both its business expansion and its global expansion coinciding with China's overall economic rise, as I mentioned earlier, also led to this process of intense geopolitical concerns raised over Huawei. And some of these concerns were indeed valid

that of course, as a telecom company, it also produces a lot of surveillance equipment, including surveillance cameras and other types of equipment for not just the Chinese market, but also in its overseas market. And that is a legitimate concern in terms of its potential security vulnerabilities. But I think it was tapped into a broader geopolitical dynamic in terms of intense US-China economic rivalry, that Huawei's global ambitions is being seen as part of Beijing's overall geopolitical ambitions. And that is some of the things that listeners in the West would probably be familiar with,

that why Huawei was constantly in the headlines over the past several years over various kinds of surveillance concerns over intellectual property, seems including different types of sanctions that the US government had slapped on around 2019, 2020. Yeah, I think that gives us such a great concise understanding of this company that we're going to be drilling into even further through the course of this interview.

But you know, as you say those things, right, it's that public profile, it's the kind of this interview. But you know, as you say those things, right, it's that public profile, it's the kind of making of smartphones and devices that people would be using, as well as then seeing the Western in particular US, you know, sanctions and issues with Huawei, that would probably be what people often associate it with, right? The kind of much more behind the scenes business, the ones that is its more primary business is the thing that people will be less familiar with, but that is really important to understanding the company and its origins. And so there are a number of things that I wanted to dig

into that you were talking about kind of earlier on in the company's history so that we can gain a better understanding and then we can dig into these kind of bigger geopolitical issues. And I wanted to go back to that transition in China from the planned economy to the market economy and what it means for a company like Huawei to be founded in that moment, particularly when you're looking at a company like ZTE, which is a big competitor of Huawei's and is state-owned or partially state-owned, whereas Huawei is set up

as a private company early on. So what does it mean to be starting a private company in that moment? what does it mean to be kind of starting a private company in that moment? What does that mean for Huawei to be founded in, you know, a particular moment like that? Yeah, this is such a great question. And I feel it is really interesting because there is a lot of these misconceptions

about Huawei as if it would somehow like the Chinese government had laid this golden egg like four decades ago, and then try to like cultivate it across four decades to have it like expand overseas. And then Xi Jinping has like a kill switch in his office and he just like pushes a button and all Huawei equipment overseas will shut down. And that's how like Beijing would take over the world. And it's after that.

Yeah, I feel like I feel like whenever like a Chinese company is successful, that has to be the image that we receive of it, right? Like, obviously, this is like whenever a Chinese company is successful, that has to be the image that we receive of it, right? Obviously, this is created by the Chinese government and they're doing it for only the most nefarious reasons. There can't be any other potential motivation or business driver or anything like that. It is quite interesting because, well, it is true that Ren Zhengfei said his first job was in the Chinese military, but it was a very humble position.

It was not that unusual for a man of his generation born in the 1940s to join the military during the Mao era as just like a career path at a time with very few options. That military career was often being seen as, oh, that is proof that he has this particular tie with the Chinese state. But that is not the case. And what is also really interesting in terms of this China's transition after the Mao era from socialism to market capitalism, and part of that transition also embodied with drastic cuts in defense spending to focus more on economic development rather than national defense. And because of that, it led to a number of things

that are closely tied with the founding of Huawei and Ren's personal career was that his former, he was an army engineering soldier. That engineering corp was disbanded as part of this transition, this reduction in military spending. And so he was dispatched to Shenzhen to work at a state-owned oil company that he didn't like, and he soon

floundered out. However, there were these new experiments that are being set up, including at this special economic zone in Shenzhen that had a pilot program that allowed private Chinese citizens to just set up tech firms as an experiment. So they could experiment, they could succeed or fail, but that's on their own. And as I mentioned earlier, Ren Zhengfei and a couple of his earlier business partners chose the field of telecommunications because that was seen as a very wide open market with a lot of business potential. But what is also very interesting at this moment with telecommunications because it has this technology component. And also it was indeed a market that needed equipment

and capital to fulfill this need. It was one of the first fields in China to open up to foreign investment. And this in terms of investment is not just in terms of capital investment, but also in terms of technology transfer. And that reflected a broader view on industrial policy and technological development in the Chinese state at the time, was that on importing technology from the West in the 1980s and

1990s was being seen as this faster way to achieve domestic capabilities. And so the Chinese government actually favored foreign firms and gave like tax breaks and other types of favorable policies to entice foreign firms to come invest in China, including like foreign telecom companies to invest in the Chinese market. And for foreign telecom companies, it was of course being seen as a wonderful business opportunity. And at that time, there was this saying back in the 1990s that the Chinese telecom market was called seven countries and eight systems. It was eight companies from seven different countries, US, European, and Japanese firms

that had their own products and they were setting up joint ventures. And their joint venture partners are usually Chinese state-owned entity. And so these were the companies that initially had the upper hand in the telecom market in China. And a private startup like Huawei was very much the scrappy kid on the block that was trying to just survive and make a name for itself. And what was also very interesting at that time was this type of foreign tech transfer

was being seen as a faster, more convenient way to enhance domestic technological capabilities. But it was not a very creative way. There were Chinese engineers and Chinese business people who had ambitions that actually exceeded the state's main policy in terms of they wanted their own technology, they wanted to innovate. And so it was very much a Chinese, like a private driven effort, not a state directed effort at that time to develop their own switches, develop their own telecom technologies. A major player in that, and then coming back to this cut in military spending. This reduction in defense spending, also the Chinese government basically told the military, right?

On one hand, there is this cut in defense spending. On the other hand, you can go find your own ways to make money. And so there was this encouraging military personnel to research dual use technology with commercial prospects as a way to have additional income. And so there was this group of military researchers led by this military engineer by the name of Wu Jiangxin, who led an effort to develop a homegrown telephone switch. This was named the O4 switch by its label that was invented in 1991. And at that time, because this is a military research team, even though they were being encouraged to develop commercial technologies, they were not capitalists and were not so much aware of and were not incentivized

to guard their intellectual property. And so the designs of the Zero Force, which was actually widely disseminated across China, including to Huawei and ZTE, and partly through the military network, partly just through technological diffusion, it also helped Huawei develop its own switch that I mentioned was approved in 1995. So this is a long history, but I think there are really interesting points that resonate a lot today. On one hand, I want to mention one anecdote

was when the Wu Jiangxin team was developing the Zero Force switch in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There was Cold War-era export control rules that barred them from accessing the most advanced chips at that time. They actually scavenged the used electronics market in Hong Kong across the border from Shenzhen to get these old chips. On the other hand, they designed this distributed computing architecture to achieve the same calculation capabilities using the less advanced chips. And so there is a lesson here about innovation under conditions

of scarcity. On the other hand, there is also this question about intellectual property and whether or not guarding intellectual property is necessarily understood as the way to incentivize innovation. We saw like in the 1990s, on one hand, the broad dissemination of the design of the zero force, which was in some ways may be seen as a blunder that the Wu team did not protect this intellectual property. On the other hand, it also helped incentivize a broader innovation ecosystem within the Chinese telecom community in general and helped spin off these a lot of different types of products that were built on the basis of the Zero Force, which were inspired by the original design on one hand,

in terms of the technological capabilities. On the other hand, it also lowered the cost of telecom communications equipment in China and helped facilitate the development of the overall telecom industry. When you talk about the 04 switch, I feel like that is an interesting opportunity to have a deeper talk about intellectual property, right?

Because I feel like this is one of the often big issues that comes up when we talk about Chinese tech companies and the accusation is always that the only way that Chinese tech companies have been able to grow is by kind of stealing the intellectual property of the West and then just kind of replicating it and building off of it. I wonder what you make of those accusations,

because certainly reading this book about Huawei by Ava Du, basically what you see is at certain times there are questions about how Chinese chips resemble some Western chips. There's a lawsuit from Cisco against Huawei later on, which I believe is about routers or something like that. But yeah, I guess this broader question around intellectual property and this accusation

that China's advances only through stealing Western intellectual property. I wonder what you make of that in relation to Huawei in particular. This is really interesting. And I also think a lot of this is about narrative and perception. We mentioned earlier this perception of Huawei

in the Western discourse that is very much divergent from its actual humble origin story. When it comes to innovation and invention, I think there is often this kind of perception that invention is something that just like burst out of nowhere, that is just this stroke of genius in an genius individuals mind. And then that intellectual property legislation and like on IP regimes are used to protect the fruits of genius of these individual minds. But that is very much not the case either for how innovation actually takes place, nor is it actually reflects the actual purpose and effects of a lot of these intellectual property regulations and legal regimes.

And so when we think about, there is a really wonderful book called Emulation Innovation by Brook Hindle, right? That was actually based on the earlier part of US history. And one of the things that one needs to remember was a lot of times the dominant narrative is not the one that is the closest to the truth. The dominant narrative is the one that is being invented and disseminated by the ones in the greater positions of power. And so when the US was by itself a developing country and European countries had the more advanced technologies,

actually US industrialists and inventors also emulated, in some ways also aggressively acquired, European designs and machines and skilled workers to the US, at times in violation of European immigration exports control laws. And then later, based on this emulation process, US inventors and engineers also made improvements upon the original designs. And that's how innovation is this incremental process that is always built on what has come before. And that is how technological developments have taken place in Europe, in the US, and also in China.

As I mentioned earlier, in China, because it's partly related to its own political development and the context of the Cold War, there were indeed long periods of relative isolation from the US-led West during the Mao era. During the reform era, when the Chinese government opened up its markets and welcoming foreign technology and foreign investment, a lot of the foreign firms were eager to invest, not just invest in Chinese markets, but also transfer part of their technology, so long as it's not the most cutting edge, the crown jewels to Chinese partners, because that was seen as a good business strategy to take advantage of the Chinese labor and

consumer market. And so that is a very important thing to keep in mind when we talk about innovation, intellectual poverty is what is the actual purpose of it. And I think one analogy on a Western listener might be more familiar with is, for example, the history of like between PC and a Mac. Apple and IBM took very different approaches where Apple decided that only Apple can make Macs while IBM decided that other companies, whether it's Compaq or Dell or Hewlett Packer, can also make PCs so long as they can pay a royalty share to IBM. That was seen as a good business strategy.

This is an important thing to keep in mind when it comes to innovation intellectual property protection. Another part that is important, which we jumps ahead in the timeline a little bit, we're still in the 90s when Huawei was a startup. But if we talk about Huawei now as a global telecom giant, another thing that is really interesting to understand is that Huawei itself holds a lot of patents. It's, I think, the most patents among any Chinese firm and it also lists really high

up there among global firms. And it's by itself very litigious, including in the US market. And it's not just as a defendant, also as a plaintiff to defend its own intellectual property rights. And so in a lot of these ways, Huawei actually, even though it is a Chinese company, it behaves very much like any of its Western origin global companies in terms of treating its intellectual property. And that brings me to my final point is a lot of times nowadays, when intellectual property in terms of commercial intellectual property is being discussed, how it is being defended, where the boundaries are drawn,

is not so much about who came up with the original idea, but it's really about who is most motivated and committed to expand and has the resources to expand to defend it. Yeah, I think that's a really good point, especially, especially thinking about power in both instances, right? Thinking about the things you were saying originally in your answer, and then what you ended with, where it's kind of like the companies that are going to be the largest, the most global are going to be most incentivized to try to defend this intellectual property. But whether it's companies just getting started or even countries that are lower down the

totem pole on like, you know, the kind of level of technological advancement or whatnot, they are going to be incentivized to kind of move up that pole. Just as you were saying with the United States early on in its own history, making sure that it was kind of learning from the more advanced ways of doing technology in other parts of the world as well. I feel like that's a good transition to talk about telecommunications technology and the importance of kind of controlling technology and all those sorts of things. But I just wanted to touch on one thing before we do that, which is I feel like when you're in the West, you will occasionally run into communists who want to say Huawei is actually great because

you don't understand that it is an employee-owned company, unlike many other Western companies or many other global companies that are these publicly traded, owned by shareholders, those sorts of things. I was interested in having you discuss that a little bit. What does it actually mean for Huawei to have a lot of its stock owned by employees? How is that related to this early founding of the company in the transition from the market economy? And does that actually mean that employees control the company? What does that mean in practice for a company like Huawei? Yeah, this is this is this is really, really interesting. Because I think before I get to the specificities about Huawei, one is China is really like it, if anything, it is proof that a country ruled by a nominally communist party can be more inscruteless in global capitalism

than a lot of countries that does not have a socialist history. So it is really interesting. And in a lot of ways, Chinese firms have even more cutthroat capitalist competition than some of its Western counterparts. And then coming back to Huawei, so I think one of the things is, as we discussed earlier, its comparatively humble beginnings and birthing out of this moment of social, political, and economic transition in China out of a relatively chaotic and elastic regulatory environment led to some of its quirks in terms of its company's management and ownership structure.

But it does not mean that Huawei is somehow like a commune that is good for the good of its employees is actually extremely exploitative and unabashedly so. And so one of, as I mentioned earlier, like when Huawei was a private startup, its competitors were much better equipped in terms of Chinese state capital and foreign investments. While Huawei did not have those advantages, one thing it did have was ambition. And so Yan Zhengfei was very aggressive in terms of recruiting tech talent to join the

firm, but he was not able to pay its employees in full. So it came up with this scheme, which was to convert part of the salaries that it owed its employees into company shares, which was like these non-voting stock options. And it was really interesting that this is something that happened then, but will probably be seen as an illegal fundraising today

in a more formalized corporate regulatory environment in China today. And also, Huawei was founded in 1987, as I mentioned, it was as part of this tech startup pilot program in the special economic zone in Shenzhen. And then through its 1990s, it also changed its structure at various points up until 1997 when it became a limited liability corporation. And that was partly also because of this regulatory transition in China as it transitioned from socialist planning into a

market economy. And so some of these are our legacy factors. However, Huawei is, as I mentioned, unabashedly exploitative of its employees that is returning to its company bylaws into its various kinds of corporate propaganda material. It claims that it also is this way that there is no job security at Huawei. No matter how long a person has worked at Huawei,

no matter what one's past contribution is, one could get fired if one couldn't keep up. Yeah, there was even like a kind of stunning story about how there were these new laws coming in in China that would give, I believe it was people who would be at a company for like a decade, additional kind of rights and things like that. And so a bunch of workers, thousands of workers at Huawei resigned and took their jobs back in order to reset their clocks so

that they wouldn't have these protections effectively. Exactly. So this was the 2008, the Chinese labor law. And so when Ren Zhengfei let his employees to preempt that before the law could take effect. So in late 2007, there were 6,000 Huawei employees, including like, and also Ren Zhengfei himself, symbolically like resigned and then reset their clocks. And so, so, so this is, I think, I think it is important that when one criticizes capitalism and Western corporations, it is also important to have a realistic understanding of what is the situation in China and not project one's fantasies and imaginations on another country and that is very far removed from reality. Well, and this is why I like speaking to you about it as well, right? Because you're giving us a very clear-eyed picture of what is going on. You know, you're not just trying to say, oh, China is amazing because it's China or anything like that. Some of the stories about the treatment of workers in this book are just really stunning.

The degree to which people are experiencing health effects because of the long working hours and the stress and those sorts of things and the expectations and demands that come from the company, not just in the early days, but even progressing to the point where it is becoming this kind of global major competitor in the telecommunications landscape. This expectation of excessive work culture coming right from the top from Ren himself. He is also engaging in this as it's described is really stunning. Yeah. That is in some ways it has been a contributing factor to Huawei's corporate

success, the way it exploits its workers. So when you think about it, right, in the telecom market, especially in terms of its overseas expansion, Huawei is able to out-compete a lot of its Western rivals because it would be able to send its workers to dangerous situations whether it's conflict zones or an immediate aftermath of a natural disaster where telecom equipment needs to be restored or repaired. It would have its workers work longer hours, it would send more workers to a single location, and it would also like be able to to keep the cost

comparatively lower. This kind of exploitation is good for the company in terms of its global competitiveness, but it is not a distinct corporate model that one should emulate. No, absolutely. And it feels worth saying as well, when we think about these Silicon Valley corporations, one of the things that we often observe about them is how they want to set up a kind of set of perks that are going to encourage their workers to stay at the office even longer and kind of this culture that expects long

working hours. It is just kind of framed and done in a very different way than what we see at a company like Huawei, but still the expectation is, you know, they want to get people to work longer hours because it is going to be of corporate benefit. Huawei's executives also like its corporate literature have also like spoken admirably of the long working hours in Silicon Valley, including the so-called mattress culture where employees sleep in their offices and have a mattress below their desks and such. Fascinating. Yeah, it's no surprise, right? Of course they would do that. But I did want

to pivot, as I was saying, to talk about these broader geopolitical and technological issues, right? One of the things that really stood out to me, even when you look at the early days and when China is improving its telecommunications technology, once its market is opening up and things like that, is the focus on the argument that it is important for a country like China or any major large country in the world to control its own telecommunications technologies. Can you talk a bit about why large countries see it as important to want to control this technology, to not be using foreign telecommunications technology in this way and what the incentive is there?

I think when it comes to telecom technology, it is really interesting because on one hand, it does require a degree of technological capability and investment to develop one's own. On the other hand, it is also a critical infrastructure that doesn't just have commercial implications, but security implications. So I think when we think about the development of telecom industry and technologies in China, I think that needs to be placed into context that lots are tied with China's historical development at different junctures. And so if we just look at what I mentioned earlier, right, in the 1980s, first of all, when telecom

market was one of the first markets in China to welcome foreign investment, both capital investment and technology transfer. So this is an area where the Chinese government certainly saw this need for foreign technology to come into the Chinese market to fulfill this domestic need. And as I mentioned, because it is a lucrative field, not just for foreign companies, but also for the Chinese state-owned partners. And so at that time, in the early stages of equipment development, a lot of the incentive was indeed to continue with this kind of foreign investment joint venture

model. And one of the most prominent examples is probably Shanghai Bell, which is of course a joint venture between the Belgian Bell telephone manufacturing company and a state-owned entity in Shanghai. Up until the end of the 20th century, Shanghai Bell was actually the world's largest manufacturer of this specific type of telephone switches. It had a lot of domestic manufacturing capacity. On the other hand, that kind of reliance on foreign tech transfer and joint ventures was always insufficient. It is insufficient in terms of the private ambitions of Chinese engineers and entrepreneurs. And it is also insufficient in terms of the security dimension. And that of course also has a historical element to it that the Chinese, of course, the Chinese Communist Party, when it was not

just nominally communist, but indeed communist as a revolutionary party, it came as this guerrilla warfare out of conditions of extreme scarcity. Self-reliance was very, very important in times of the party's own identity and partly as part of a national identity that was through the Mao era that there was a strong emphasis on self-reliance and self-sufficiency in terms of science and technology. And that is not purely out of ideological reasons, but also serves a pragmatic purpose, partly because of Cold War era embargoes, and partly out of this security concerns that self-reliance and self-sufficiency is important. So I think that dimension has always been present,

but whether or not that dimension is dominant really depends on a specific historical period and what are the domestic and international conditions that weighs on Beijing's calculus. Well, and I like to pick up on that as well, because I think you laid that out really nicely. And basically what we start to see as China opens up to the world is a number of events that encourages it

to think more in relation to self-reliance and to be skeptical of this relationship with the United States, whether it is the kind of 1999 embassy bombing that the United States, whether it is the kind of 1999 embassy bombing that the United States engages in that obviously has a lot of serious effects with how Chinese people relate to the United States, especially given, as you were saying, this longstanding hostile relationship between the two countries. But then, of course, as well, if you're thinking about telecommunications in particular, the

revelations in the Snowden leaks that Huawei's network had been accessed and compromised by the National Security Agency in the United States, and they were able to gain access to all these conversations and things that were going through Huawei's network. Can you talk about how that also increases this desire for self-reliance and this pressure for China to develop its own technologies rather than being reliant on US technology? Yeah, it is a great question since you pointed out these two different time periods in 1999 with the Belgrade bombings where US missiles hit by accident as the US government insists while a lot of the Chinese public are not convinced. And the Snowden leaks, which happened in the early 2010s, what has

changed dramatically over this course of about 15 years is China's position in terms of global capitalism. And so if we look back at 1999, China was not yet a member of the World Trade Organization. And what was actually quite ironic was right, like weeks before the Belgrade embassy bombing, and then Chinese premier Zhu Rongji had just visited the US with a list of concessions that the Chinese government were willing to make in terms of its domestic trade and market policies as a way to earn the US's approval for China to join the WTO. At that time, the Chinese government was also encouraging domestic firms, both state-owned enterprises and private companies like Huawei, to enter the overseas market to experiment, but also as a way to show goodwill that China is really honestly

trying to become a responsible player in global capitalism. But this was when China was still very much on the periphery of global capitalism. And what the Belgrade bombing, it's a national wound and it would reveal to a lot of Chinese people the imbalance, the inequalities of a world system that their country has been trying so hard to be a part of. And what has happened over the next 15 years up until the point of the Edward Snowden, at least with China has indeed emerged from the periphery to inching closer to the core, I guess, up until the early 2010s in global capitalism. Also, the 2008 global financial crisis was also a shock to the Chinese leadership in terms of seeing the vulnerabilities of the

US economy and Western capitalism. That was also an incentive in terms of self-reliance and self-sufficiency. But what really happened with the Snowden leaks was, I guess it was twofold, right? Both technological and ideological in terms of the revelations to the Chinese state. On one hand, the technological part is that the Western telecom equipment had inherent vulnerabilities and the US government had the technical capability to infiltrate effectively any telecom network around the world, including Huawei's, and not just in terms of surveillance, but potentially to sabotage as well.

And on the other hand, the ideological part is that since the US government has this capability and is willing to use that capability, then there is no particular reason to unilaterally disarm or just trust its Western counterpart on the Chinese state's part. That is really important. That is not just an economic incentive and it's not just in terms of national pride, but it's really a matter of national security to be able to have domestic technologies in terms of these critical infrastructures. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And I want to pick up on that, right? And dig into it a little bit further, because obviously, when we look at the United States and its accusations against Chinese tech companies and Huawei in particular, one of the things that

they often argue is that the reason that Chinese tech companies need to in particular, one of the things that they often argue is that the reason that Chinese tech companies need to be restricted, the reason why Huawei needs to be banned from US and Western telecommunications networks is because of this threat of Chinese surveillance and Chinese spying, right? That China could tap into these telecommunications technologies and then that China could tap into these telecommunications technologies and then listen in to what people in the West are saying or that China could use TikTok to get all of our data or what have you. I feel like one of the values of the argument that you're making is not so much to say China would never theoretically be able to do something like this, but rather the United States can do this. It does do this. It seems like quite a hypocritical stance to then say it wants nobody else to be able to do this thing that it is doing to everybody else and not willing

to stop doing. Yeah. So I think the question is never whether or not Huawei assists state surveillance. That answer is in the affirmative. But the point is, Huawei doesn't just assist Chinese state surveillance, it also assists state surveillance in other countries. It's willing to sell its surveillance technologies to any country that's willing to buy it. On the other hand, Huawei is certainly not alone in terms of selling surveillance technologies to any country or any individual entity that wants to buy it.

And so I think what is important here is not to defend Huawei, which shouldn't be defended in terms of its complicities and its actions, but in terms of actually having a correct diagnosis of the problem, that this is not a problem that is unique to Huawei. It is not a problem that is unique to Chinese firms, and it's not a problem that is unique to companies that bore out of an authoritarian system. This is really a problem that is inherent to surveillance capitalism or capitalism in general. We can think about security concerns with telecom equipment along these three categories. The first vulnerability is technical, which should be company and

country agnostic. This means whether or not this equipment itself, the hardware or the software itself has some kind of vulnerability that can be exploited. And that can be evaluated in a company and country agnostic way. That's a technical evaluation. And then I know there are like different evaluations of Huawei's equipment and we're not getting to the details of that. But that is a technical assessment. The second type of potential vulnerability is regulatory, which is not in terms of the equipment per se, but in terms of, let's say, the data that has been collected by this equipment and during its collection, storage, and transmission,

whether there are different regulatory loopholes, that means this information can be exploited, can be sold to others, parties, and data brokers and such and exploited in other ways. But these are regulatory vulnerabilities that there are not enough oversight, there are not enough restrictions in terms of the exploitation of information that goes through telecom equipment. And that by itself should also be company and country agnostic, that regulations should, if it needs to be effective, then it cannot just target one company or companies from one country. But a lot of these discussions about potential surveillance and security concerns with regards to Huawei are very much removed from the questions of technical or regulatory vulnerabilities,

but this falls only into the third category, which is geopolitical. That's very much about US-China relations, about concerns over China's economic rise in the US, including why we see some of these very divergent security assessment between the US security establishment and its traditional allies in, like say, in the UK and in some European countries where they do use Huawei equipment and do not come to the same degree of security concern or evaluation as the US does. And at times the US government has basically pressured its allies to remove Huawei equipment from their networks. And at times we also see other geopolitical questions such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine that has raised the security alarm bells in Europe

and that has extended to more alarms and more scrutiny over Chinese equipment like Huawei's equipment as well. But these are questions that actually do not immediately touch on the technical or the regulatory aspects. And I'm not saying the geopolitical concerns are not valid, but they are not the way to understand what are the actual vulnerabilities that come with telecom equipment and telecom infrastructure in general. I think that's a really important point

and a really good way to put it. And I really just wanted to end off by asking you about something that you wrote about near the end of your review of this book, The House of Huawei, which is, you know, you were really talking about how tools of communication do not have to be inherently technologies of capture, right? Do not have to be used in these ways

that we hear our governments talking about being concerned about, but then they're also often engaging in. Can you talk about this aspect to it and what you see as the potential of these technologies and how to avert them being used in these kind of very harmful and concerning ways? One thing that concerns me greatly over the past few years with regards to this discourse, as I mentioned, a lot of these questions that are technical or regulatory questions about technology and surveillance capitalism are being captured by this techno-nationalistic great power rivalry framework. And then the

actual problems are being obscured or skewed and the diagnosis is skewed. And then the solutions actually do not address the real issues such as like ripping out Huawei's equipment doesn't really address the problems of surveillance capitalism. And so what has become really interesting is Huawei has become a lot more popular in China over the past several years,

and it's no longer just a successful Chinese firm, but it's now becoming seen as the symbol of Chinese pride that is under siege from evil Western imperialists. For example, my mother who doesn't care about brands or anything at all, she now insists that she would only use Huawei cell phones. I can understand it's becoming like it's not just like a commercial choice, but it's becoming an ideological one. Oh, I definitely understand that being in Canada today and, you know, the increasing Canadian nationalism in response to, you know, the threats from Donald Trump and wanting

to buy Canadian and all those sorts of things. Like, I'm sure that's a common thing around the world when the perception is that anything related to your country is under threat and you kind of like rally around it. Yeah. And to that extent, it is in some ways like, of course, like I don't criticize my mother's consumer choices. She can use whatever products she wishes. But this overall nationalistic rallying around a company like Huawei in some ways is sad. And since you mentioned the 1999 Belgrade embassy bombing, there was also a rallying around these nationalistic symbols, this heightened nationalism in China in the immediate aftermath, even though back then it wasn't rallying around commercial companies, rallying around the

symbols of the state. But then of course, it's the symbols of an authoritarian state that also suppresses its own people. And so nowadays when one sees these very nationalistic rhetoric from Chinese people around Huawei, but then Huawei also exploits its workers, which still predominantly are Chinese workers. It also sells surveillance technology to Chinese companies that helps with surveilling the Chinese population. So like Huawei is not like good for the Chinese people. So this is I think that that is partly the sadness that we see some echoing of that, say here in the US, where this great power competition is being used as a way for US tech firms to argue against regulation, that they shouldn't be regulated because they need to freely compete with Chinese state champions like Huawei,

even though it's not really a state champion, at least not in the beginning. And so then it's still like it's the people, the workers, the consumers in both countries and around the world that are being exploited by corporate interests and by national security interests. And I think that is part of the sadness that these techno-nationalistic and state capitalist rhetoric are foreclosing the political and moral imagination in terms of thinking about what are these communications technologies actually for? I like, when we think about it,

communication is actually one of the things that is both so vital to daily life, but it's also something that has a dimension that is by contrast is intimate and it is meant to connect people. It does not need to be, and I would argue should not be, this site of extraction, exploitation as the site of profit. So how do we imagine a way to wire up the world and to network individuals and communities in a way where the infrastructure is not controlled and dominated by a handful of the most powerful entities, be it a state entity or a corporate entity.

And I think that is the question that should be asked. That is the important question rather than whether or not Xi Jinping has a secret switch to all the Huawei switches. Like. Yeah, no, I think you've put that so well. And that is inherently not just a technological question, but a political question as well, right? And the type of political system that would enable

something like that. And I really appreciate you drawing that comparison between the United States and China to say, it is not that Huawei is the good guy against the bad Silicon Valley's, it's that this geopolitical contest between China and the United States helps these exploitative monopolistic firms on both sides

that have a whole load of harms associated with them. Yang Yang, I always appreciate having you on the show, getting your insights. Thank you so much for taking the time again to come back on Tech Won't Save Us. Oh, thank you so much for having me and thank you for your insights of questions as well. Yangyang Zhang is a research scholar in law

and a fellow at the Yale Law School's Palzai China Center. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation Magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marx. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't

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