Transcript: House of Huawei: Eva Dou of the Washington Post on Her New "Secret History" of Huawei

Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, to Oana Grigor and Natalia Polom for checking and formatting, and to Zhou Keya for the image! Listen in the embedded player above.

Special thanks this week to the amazing Lili Shoup, who’s winding down her internship for Sinica. Thanks, Lili, for the fantastic work, and congratulations on completing your Master’s Degree at Freiburg.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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When it comes to writing about the company, Huawei, the challenge is pretty enormous. I know this because I’ve written about it. I mean, it was 20 years ago, but among many things that one has to try to right-size, even back then, is the extent to which you talk about it as a political story, as with any Chinese company above a certain size or above a certain level of significance. You can’t really ignore the political angle, but this is really, especially so in the case of a company like Huawei. The problem is, of course, that not everyone is equipped to not only get the proportions right, politically or whatever, but to write about the company, also as a business, to write and report intelligently and excessively about its technology, which is, you know, its heart, to tell the human scale story of the founders, of key personnel, of a lot of drama, in the case of Huawei, a lot of drama.

And then to situate all of that within not only the domestic Chinese political context, but also an international context. And it’s fraught. It’s incredibly complex. So, for my money, Eva Dou’s House of Huawei succeeds on all of these fronts. It’s just a terrific book, and not just if you’re interested in learning more about Huawei as a company. I mean, in her hands, this becomes a vitally important book about China. She captures all of the contradictions, the good and the bad, the impressive, the unquestionably admirable, and the deeply problematic. And she contextualizes without being guilty of whataboutism. I mean, it’s the most even-handed treatment of this monumentally complicated company that has been written so far. And really one of the best about the country, too. Eva Dou is a correspondent for the Washington Post. She’s the tech correspondent there.

She has formally written with the Wall Street Journal, and I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be talking to her about this fantastic book. Eva, welcome to Sinica. And congratulations on birthing really two children recently. The book being, of course, the far less important of the two, but I probably couldn’t keep everyone’s interest if I just talk to you about your new baby. So, welcome.

Eva Dou: Thank you so much, Kaiser, for having me here.

Kaiser: So, Eva, before we jump in, I just have to say it, it’s hard to think… I kept thinking about this. Is there an American company that mirrors the story of the United States so well as the way Huawei mirrors the history of China a lot across the last what? 30, 40 years? I mean, I know neither of us are the first people to have realized how Huawei is such a great proxy for the story of China. But I just got to say this, Eva, I absolutely love the way you structured the book to get that across. I mean, you didn’t lead people by the nose to this familiar idea, by now quite familiar idea that Huawei is a microcosm of China. And when you did get there at the end of the book, you set it up and you delivered it in a way that was so insightful. It felt genuinely profound and managed to be like fresh and exciting in a way that my own rather banal observations just now in the intro weren’t. So, we won’t spoil how you did that. At the end of the show, I do want to ask, well, how much you’re willing to say about that, but readers can enjoy it for themselves. I wanted to tell you just how well that whole thing worked for me. It was just great. So, congrats.

Eva: Thank you so much. Thanks. Really appreciate all the kind words. And I think that’s sort of the mirroring of Huawei’s story with China’s broader development over the decades is exactly what held my interest in this project for long enough to get it done. It felt very much like a meaningful exploration of China’s journey writ large through the lens of this company.

Kaiser: Totally. And you nailed it. So, I see that’s what held your interest, but what got you interested initially? I mean, when did you start working on the book? And was it like Meng Wanzhou episode that made you decide to start writing it or what? Because that’s what you lead with.

Eva: Yeah. So, around that time, the Meng Wanzhou episode, the detention of the founder’s daughter, who’s also the CFO during the first Trump presidency, I think that’s when a lot of journalists started writing about the company in the news on a regular basis. And that’s when I sort of realized that the raw materials to do this kind of longer longitudinal study of the company were there in a way that it’s really hard to find for hardly any other Chinese company, one that was founded in the 1980s, that the dawn of China’s big experiment with capitalism, and who has been there on the front lines of every wave of new policies since then. And not only that they’ve been there, but the documentation exists to be able to reconstruct scenes and to reconstruct a sense of what life was like along the way.

Kaiser: Still, I get the sense that it must have been pretty challenging to report some of this stuff out. I mean, they’re a pretty famously difficult company to work with, I mean, in terms of comms. I mean, but were they helpful? Were they obstructive? Were they hostile? Some combination. Or did you just bypass them altogether?