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

Posted by msmash on from the how-about-that dept.

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."

6 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Ain't tryin' to crush you buddy by SuperKendall · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    1. Re: Ain't tryin' to crush you buddy by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    2. Re:Ain't tryin' to crush you buddy by Xylantiel · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  2. no no! wrong question! by guygo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Long history of bad behaviour by seoras · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

    1. Re:Long history of bad behaviour by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.