Huawei, the Chinese tech leader, is still, by far and away, the company that the United States and its allies, love to hate most. They say their animosity is on security grounds, but to me, it’s based on their own profound insecurity. They accuse the company of providing back door monitoring access to the Chinese government, but to this day no country or its intelligence apparatus has even proven the specious allegation. All they can do is to continue to follow the technique of Adolph Hitler’s big lie, wherein, as the theory goes, if you lie loud and long enough, people will believe the lie as truth.

Far from a malevolent actor, Huawei is an exemplary company meriting the highest praise from objective observers, not only for its technological prowess, but for how it treats its employee-owners and for its pro-social orientation to society at large. Corporate Social Responsibilty (CSR) and its latest iteration, Environmental. Social and Governance (ESG) are a core of Huawei’s very corporate DNA.

Huawei is especially demonized by Western reactionaries, neoconservatives and Luddites, who believe that companies have no business in promoting social good at the expense of ROI and profit. In fact, it's worse than that as they believe that governments have no business in supporting the poor or less fortunate in any way. Sink or swim is their motto. We know it by another name: social Darwinism. And in fact, it’s ever worse than that because these same people, who sing the praises of competition, are sore losers.

As illustrated by a recent conversation between Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei with the president, coaches and champions of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), this churlish attitude is 180 degrees opposite from Huawei’s compassionate capitalism.

Huawei supports the ICPC to globally showcase college students’ creativity and teamwork and their ability to program, analyze and problem solve in subjects like biology, math and physics under extreme time pressure.

Ren said that “teamwork is not only the basis for winning contests, but also the basis for survival.” He rightly said that ‘teamwork is necessary to drive greater prosperity for humanity” because “when we come together, we will inspire and compete with each other” leading to the “explosive development of new scientific technologies.”

Unlike some other companies in other countries that are driven by insecurity, Ren said that Huawei would continue to work with the academic community to cultivate outstanding talent in the information domaine.

He said that Huawei would never seek to monopolize the talent it helped to grow and nurture, but to the contrary, would encourage these talents to return home to rejuvenate the information sectors of their own countries.

Huawei encourages the next generation of global talent not only by global competitions, but gives these budding future tech innovators access to the boundless frontiers afforded by Huawei’s device-edge-network-cloud platform in order to enable them to take their work to higher levels of creativity and accomplishment.

Mr. Ren said that while Huawei is a business, it doesn’t only seek profits. Its bottom line is not merely financial, but societal. That’s why the company supports these competitions even if unrelated to Huawei’s business in hoping that knowledge gained is used to create “more wealth and eliminate poverty, enabling humanity to embark on a road toward affluence.”

I was especially touched by Ren’s discussion of “useless research” in science which actually is a misnomer because it’s research whose use may be currently unknown or yet to be connected to where it can be an agent of profound change. Since, however, boundaries between science and technologies are blurring, while the time it takes for science to translate into useful technologies is shrinking, so-called “useless research” doesn’t stay useless for very long. At best it’s in a state of suspended animation, ready to spring into action, at the very moment that the dots are connected.

Huawei subscribes to the saying when the going gets tough, the tough get going. Subjected to unfair unilateral US tariffs on their goods, and technologically being denied access to high quality computer chips, Huawei was forced to innovate with a gun to their head and innovate—and survive—they did.

Not only that, but despite heavy loses, due to US encirclement, Huawei continues to innovate and prosper. At the same time, they continue their CSR and ESG programs to support women and minorities, to conquer the tech world of tomorrow.

It’s no wonder that some in West are angry at Huawei. Having administered a series of kicks in the pants to the company’s operation and bottom lines, the company not only survives but thrives. Huawei’s strengths are embodied in their global pro-social values and continued accomplishments.

Dr. Harvey Dzodin
Senior Fellow of Center for China & Globalization

Harvey Dzodin, Senior Fellow of Center for China & Globalization.

(Viewpoint) Progress, not only profit