The US Cannot Crush Us, Says Huawei Founder (bbc.com)

The founder of Huawei has said there is "no way the US can crush" the company, in an interview with the BBC. From the report: Ren Zhengfei, founder and president of Huawei, described the arrest of his daughter Meng Wanzhou, the company's chief financial officer, as politically motivated. The US is pursuing criminal charges against Huawei and Ms Meng, including money laundering, bank fraud and stealing trade secrets. Huawei denies any wrongdoing.

Mr Ren spoke to the BBC's Karishma Vaswani in his first international broadcast interview since Ms Meng was arrested -- and dismissed the pressure from the US. "There's no way the US can crush us," he said. "The world cannot leave us because we are more advanced. Even if they persuade more countries not to use us temporarily, we can always scale things down a bit." However, he acknowledged that the potential loss of custom could have a significant impact. [...] Mr Ren warned that "the world cannot leave us because we are more advanced". "If the lights go out in the West, the East will still shine. And if the North goes dark, there is still the South. America doesn't represent the world. America only represents a portion of the world."

Comments

Ain't tryin' to crush you buddy

[SuperKendall]

Just want you to follow the law.

You can do business any way you like within those confines. Not our problem if you can't hack it without hacking others.

Re: Ain't tryin' to crush you buddy

[Tablizer]

In China the law is a little different, it's hard for them to understand Western law.

Canadian officials said something similar when China asked to have the accused Huawei executive handed back to China immediately.

Canadian officials kept emphasizing their separation of powers requires that the courts finish their job, barring some national emergency. In the Chinese system, if the leader(s) say "do X" you do X, no questions asked. Business hierarchies there are similar, I hear, at least more so than the USA.

Re:Ain't tryin' to crush you buddy

[Xylantiel]

Yeah, Chinese executives seem to just betray the fact that they don't understand the rule of law and how an actual functional justice system works. Instead of saying that they will prevail in court against the charges, they say things that seem to imply that the CFO should be let off for entirely political reasons. That may be the norm in China, but in non-authoritarian countries that isn't how it works.

no no! wrong question!

[guygo]

When asked, Mr. Ren did not wish to discuss the communist party members they were forced to hire in order to monitor their compliance with the Chinese government's diktat that all software companies must be available to be part of state intelligence collection operations. Instead he ended the interview.

BBC story=intrusive video ads

[AnalogDiehard]

The link to the story reminded me why I stopped reading BBC News online. Too many video ads, and when you scroll down they keep interfering with the text I am trying to read. Too disruptive, I closed down the webpage quickly.

Long history of bad behaviour

[seoras]

I remember back when Huawei started, I was working at Cisco, and Cisco took them to court for stealing the code to IOS and shipping it running on their own routers (which I think were also hardware copies of cisco routers).
Cisco won because Huawei hadn't bothered to fix the typos in the IOS text. The Huawei routers had identical text errors in "their" UI. They also had Cisco's IOS bugs too!

Re:Long history of bad behaviour

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironic considering how Cisco started.

Bosack and his wife Lerner founded Cisco when both of them were still employed at Stanford. Bosack continued working at Stanford with Cisco co-worker and co-founder Kirk Lougheed, where they developed the company's first router. However, it was an exact replica of Stanford's "Blue Box" router and ran an unlicensed copy of the university's multiple-protocol router software, which was adapted into the foundation of Cisco IOS.

In 1986, Bosack and Lougheed were forced to resign from Stanford over the product's development, and the university considered filing criminal charges against Cisco over the theft of its intellectual property. However, Stanford eventually agreed to license its router software and two computer boards to Cisco in 1987.

Re:"And if the North goes dark,..." meaning?

[Anonymous Coward]

I took it to mean, the Southern Hemisphere. In this context it probably mostly consists of South America and Africa.

Australia and New Zealand of course geographically fall into the Southern Hemisphere. Australia has traditionally tended to go along with American policies; New Zealand has more history of independent foreign policy. This time though it's unclear what they will do. The Aussies have clearly branded themselves as being in the Asian hemisphere and they do a lot of business with China.

TL;DR, no idea what Australia and New Zealand will do here. Anyone?

Re:"And if the North goes dark,..." meaning?

[williamyf]

Once you read the whole quote in TFS it makes sense.

The West is North America (USoA, CAN) and Europe. the east is Asia (please bear in mind that Russia strands europe and Asia), and perhaps a tad of the Arabic countries.

the north is again NA and EU, while the south is South America and Africa. Oceania (Oz, NZ) are another matter.

disclaimer: Used to work for Huawei in my home country, the chinese smetimes have a poetic way to speak... Specially when threatening/threatened.