The seeds of a number of the myths, rumors, innuendo and
outright lies about China-based Huawei technologies (my employer) may well have
been planted in 2000,in a little-read article in a relatively unknown publication, by a relatively obscure academic.
A Bruce Gilley December 2000 article in the now-defunct Far
Eastern Economic Review, titled “Huawei’s Fixed Line to Beijing,” is
chock full of “may’s,” “according to sources,” and “according to local press reports,” but
at no time does the author actually factually substantiate his oft-repeated premise
of “widespread evidence of strong
official backing” of Huawei (his repeated unsubstantiated references to variations
of “strong government support” are almost mind-numbing).
Nevertheless, the article seems the Rosetta Stone behind
several key pieces of Huawei mis-information that have been repeatedly
regurgitated by one or another Sinophobe for the better part of the
last decade. Indeed, elements of the
article, referenced and footnoted dozens of times in U.S. government and other reports and
statements, have somehow morphed into “intelligence.”
The impact of the Gilley piece is no small matter. While the corrupt seeds Gilley planted may
seem innocuous to some, they serve as the foundation for the mis-informed (or
simply ill-intended) bashing of Huawei today .
Indeed, just one Gilley misrepresentation – related to the life history
of Huawei’s Founder and CEO - has been at the heart of so-called national
security concerns associated with Huawei.
To wit: “Huawei’s Fixed Line to Beijing” introduces an incorrect biography of Huawei’s Founder Ren Zhengfei that supposedly-reputable
think tanks and intelligence bodies and politicians and media have re-spewed, over and over again, for
years, without once checking the facts.
Gilley, the academic few have ever heard of, was for whatever reasons
afforded the credibility of trusted (and sole) gospel.
Check this out:
In his December 2000 article, Gilley wrote: “Huawei was founded in 1988 by Ren Zhengfei,
a former director of the Information Engineering Academy of the PLA’s General
Staff Department, according to company sources.
The academy is responsible for telecoms research for the Chinese
military.”
In its 2005 report titled “A New Direction for China’s
Defense Industry,” the world-renowned American Think Tank (and U.S.
Government go-to resource) RAND
repeated Gilley’s text almost verbatim (sans the “according to company sources”
parenthetical and with the sentences joined – edits which seemingly justified the lack
of footnote): “Huawei was founded in1988
by Ren Zhengfei, a former director of the PLA General Staff Department’s
Information Engineering Academy, which is responsible for telecom research for
the Chinese military.”
From this purported biography, any number of nefarious
connections between Huawei and the Chinese government were surmised, and
potential national security threats conjectured. (Incidentally, Ren’s true bio is available on
Huawei’s website – among other things, the facts are that he was a civil
engineer who never worked in telecom or “information engineering” until
founding Huawei in 1987).
Gilley’s 2000 article also gave birth to the myth of Huawei
having some special designation from the Chinese Government, with Gilley
coining a phrase that would later take on a life of its own: “Beijing wants Huawei to be its national
champion.” RAND
again parroted Gilley in its 2005 Report, trumpeting “national champion” as
some sort of official PRC title and blessing.
The RAND Report
lent credence to Gilley’s version of Ren’s bio and the so-called “national
champion” status, and these utter fictions subsequently morphed into “facts” in the
ensuing years, with the likes of the U.S.-China
Economic and Security Review Commission (created by the Congress in 2000 to
monitor, investigate, and make annual reports and recommendations on the
national security implications of the relationship between the U.S. and the PRC),
various reputable think tanks ala The Heritage
Foundation, and numerous Sinophobic Members
of Congress (reaching a crescendo with the sham of an “investigation” of
Huawei by the Chairman of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee in 2012).
Yet worse (and sadly), the politically-biased (or simply
lazy) government perpetuation of myth was further driven by the immediacy
imperative of today’s media and the related phenomenon of copy-paste journalism,
with few if any bothering to check facts or to question contradictions.
Indeed, to the extent that the myths have been challenged, such challenges
have been largely ignored or dismissed, resulting in the further festering of
FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) related to Huawei, whether due to political
expedience, or, perhaps, simply a lack of intellectual or time-oriented bandwidth.
Until earlier this year…
The Washington-based Center
for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), another high-end think
tank, has not historically been friendly to Huawei. Indeed, at least one CSIS "scholar" has regularly exposed himself as little more than a puppet of American Sinophobes and Defense and Intelligence
hawks, willfully spreading known misinformation to further political or anti-competitive
agendas.
Yet, in February 2013, a Huawei case study included in a CSIS Report titled “China’s
Competitiveness: Myth, Reality and Lessons for the United States and Japan,”
actually put an end to at least one of the poison flowers seeded by Gilley
thirteen years earlier.
While the relatively-balanced Report cites and footnotes other Gilley (and
additional) misinformation, when it comes to the reference to Huawei’s Founder
and CEO, CSIS writes: “Ren had been working
in the engineering corps of the PLA, rising to the level of Deputy Director,
but left in 1983 after the corps was disbanded.” Notably missing from this brief biographic
sketch is any reference to Ren having served as “Director of the Information
Engineering Academy of the PLA’s General Staff Department.”
But there is a footnote…
The original draft of the CSIS Report actually featured the
fallacious Gilley bio, but, to the author’s credit, when he was quickly challenged
on this, and subsequently conducted further research, the Gilley/RAND/USCC,
etc. myth was discarded. Per the
footnote in the CSIS Report:
“An earlier version of
this case study placed Ren at the Information Engineering Academy of the PLA’s
General Staff Department. The accuracy
of this is now in doubt, and seems to have originated from a report in 2000 that
was used as a source for a large number of subsequent press, think tank and
government publications.”
With that, a thirteen-year old Huawei-related fallacy – the most
regularly trotted out turd supporting concerns related to so-called national
security threats – has been effectively undone. While Huawei certainly bears the
responsibility to further and better clarify the facts about its history, based
on the CSIS reversal of more than a dozen years of myth, perhaps it’s also time
for those that purport untruths about Huawei - and then challenge the company
to prove the negatives - to instead themselves be challenged to prove their
so-called positives.
