There’s also something the Chinese state calls “fusion centres” which is one of the most interesting facets of this intelligence-industrial complex in China.
Essentially the state decides, let’s say high tech cutting edge batteries for storing renewable energy is where they want to invest in. They gather a few companies into a building that can do it or are interested. They then have state representatives who effectively ask “what do we need to know” and “who are the major players in the field.
In a month or so they come back again. They do big closed door presentation for all the companies in the building. Suddenly all the Chinese companies in the space start delivering R&D and eventually products that match some of the best stuff being done in the space. You could almost say they’ve learnt to copy it..
How do they do it? Industrial espionage, essentially, and building an industrial and intelligence infrastructure that allows for maximum impact of the state’s intelligence apparatus into the national economy. In a way it’s kind of brilliant.
I heard it described by an NSA analyst in a very interesting talk. I thought it was fascinating and speaks exactly to your point. The idea that we are competing with “free market” Chinese companies is a fiction that we’ve made up in our own minds. It’s just not how China works. And to be fair it’s been working gang busters for them.
To be fair, most of innovation in America also comes from the public sector not the private one. Economist Mariana Mazzucato famously wrote about this and more in her book "The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths" which I highly recommend if you're interested.
I think it's a little misguided to say that China's innovation is solely due to corporate espionage. States have always been effective at spurring innovation when it's needed. We only need to look as far back as America's highly productive and innovative war economy to see that
I'm sure they do it, but I'm also pretty sure everyone else is doing it too, to some extent at least - FSB, NSA, BND, DGSE and Mossad were all previously accused of it. And not just industrial espionage, but also of providing contacts, logistics and actively lobbying in emerging markets for their national companies to get the best deals, which also often includes corruption and gray-zone private deals with local government officials. As someone who lives in one of those countries I've heard some pretty grim stories.
Fascinating. Do you know any recent good books that cover the topic? I'm thinking something like Browder's Red Notice, but for China. Misha Glenny delved into China in his McMafia, but it was more about smuggling in the Fujian province, and its governor at the time: Xi.
You and the original poster have described the exact way China has, up to this point, effectively leveraged a balance between state directed means of production and corporate capitalism. It is simultaneously brilliant and terrifying. The real question is how long the communist state apparatus can restrain their desire for absolute control. If they can maintain this balance for the next 20 years, China may become the dominant superpower in the world. However, if they cannot control the party's baser instincts, the Chinese economy may collapse under its own weight within the next decade.
This makes me think that the whole IP sharing/stealing is in the cultural fabric of Chinese business dealings. And it would be nearly impossible for Trump to fix it through his current trade negotiations.
This just completely ignores the massive sums of money Chinese companies are spending on R&D. I'm sure that China engages in industrial espionage, as do many countries, but chalking up China's development into higher-value-added economic sectors to espionage leaves out the fact that they now spend more on R&D than Japan, Germany and South Korea combined.
The most informative comment I’ve heard about Chinese business is that one needs to take the western conception of state / military / corporation and chuck them out the window. In essence these are all descriptive functions of the same entity in China, and any apparent separation is just that—apparent.
I know some may reply that, for example, Lockheed effectively lives at this nexus also. It’s a good argument, and probably similar though not exactly the same in arrangement.
To me, the most interesting difference is that China has this kind of relationship with its major players regardless of industry, not just their defense contractors. So it doesn’t matter if you make cell phones, video games, toilet seats, ship hulls, or concrete—the whole concept of an enterprise not being interdependent on the state is a non-starter there. Whether it’s happening via backchannels to party officials or through ownership schemes like this one, the concept of private and public sector is so muddy there as to be almost meaningless.
To me, this tells us a lot more about IP infringement and espionage than what we usually read, because where the west likes to conceive of corporations as competing in a market in China it’s more useful to describe corporations as tools of statecraft.
Huawei wants us to think of them as competing with Apple because they both make cellphones. In reality, it’s as though the CIA or Mossad was competing with Apple—the aims of each may in fact be orthogonal to each other because market performance is not the real driver of the company’s decisions.
It's important to note that this deep integration of corporations and the state is by no means unique to China - to a great extent, Deng Xiaoping's modernization in the 1980s emulated the chaebol of South Korea and the Keiretsu of Japan. Korean and Japanese business is based on tacit relationships between extremely large vertically-integrated corporations and the state while China has more overt elements of a command economy, but the effect is essentially the same.
The least cynical reading is that it's an expression of neo-Confucian values; those in a position of political, military or economic power have a broad belief in the importance of cooperation and "social harmony". If the NSA want to access all of Google's data, they hide an implant in a data center, put optical splitters on key fiber links or bribe a third party to provide a backdoor in a vital software dependency (PRISM and BULLRUN). If the PLA want Tencent's data or the NIS want Samsung's data they just ask for it, on the understanding that a) they're not really in a position to say no and b) cooperation with the state is a mutually beneficial quid-pro-quo.
The concept of state and corporation should be separate to protect freedom is really a US phenomenon or ideal.
In East Asia, the Japanese model, that later adopted by both South Korea and China, relies on the exact opposite. The government directly involves in guiding and shaping the economy. And they are smart in doing so, with the corporations being their vehicles to implement its policy and they are ones to picking the winners. So it is not like Planned Economy like the Soviets did, instead they are trying to embrace and take advantage of the market to better advance its objectives. Instead, here in US, corporations are more sensitive and faster than the government to propose new economic initiatives, while government just sits aside as the shepherd to prevent disasters.
If you ever being able to read material from CJK countries, the government in general has a much bigger power and responsibility, and when problem happens, the societies' instinct is to push the government to act on it.
But Huawei might be still a special case among of these. It is a weird company though, which doesn't need to respond to its share holders and yet participating actively in open and competitive markets.
There are state-owned companies, and there are private companies. Competition is intense.
The links of private companies with party officials is not caused by some cultural difference that makes boundaries fuzzy but by plain old unchecked power and corruption: The Party can make or break you so you need to stay on "friendly" terms with them.
This tends to happen everywhere there is no separation of powers and rule of law. In China it is simply perhaps better organised (or perhaps not).
A corollary is that being a Party member is useful for one's career. The Party also recruits as a way of keeping control.
To some extent has been true for every big country that has successfully become a first world country after the WWII devastation. After the WWII Japan, South Korea, and Germany all had trade policies where the government coordinated closely with big export sector companies. Japan was famous for copying everything. Japanese businessmen toured western factories as potential customers with cameras, went home and build the same factory.
The trick to success is to expose companies to free competition in the global markets while protecting and supporting them in every other way. State aid in financing loan guarantees was the norm. Protecting home markets from competition was the norm.
Market performance is not the real driver of the company’s decisions.
Every company has different stakeholders, who have different interests. The German state of lower saxony has a 20% stake in VW. That doesn't mean that VW does not compete with other car makers.
I'd like to elaborate on the unity of the different elements of Chinese society you mention.
Chinese institutions are all unified under a single structure, and that structure is the Communist (in name only) Party. Party members are embedded in every single important facet of society. Education, the military, the government, the private sector, it's all linked and unified by the party.
Now, we can compare this structure to the mammalian neocortex. The neocortex incorporates inputs from lower layers of the brain to form high level abstractions and integrations.
The West is basically functioning without a neocortex. Our institutions are not unified. There is no integrating layer above the corporate sector and government. In fact they are often at odds.
What I am saying is that China represents an existential threat to the entire project of the West. If China is able to outcompete us with their more advanced (?) organization, we will be forced to copy them or become irrelevant. This would mean doing away with free democracies and instituting a ruling party - a neocortex - to oversee the entire society.
I am not sure this would even be possible in diverse societies like those of the Western democracies. There is too much infighting and tribalism, at least right now.
That does not bode well for us.
But it's possible that cultural unity within our democracies may be sufficient to align the different parts of society to allow us to compete with China, without the formal superstructure of an all powerful Party.
Bigger corporations are indeed highly influenced if not outright owned by the state. But smaller businesses like these mom-and-pop shops and young startups certainly are not.
I think this is a perfectly reasonable analogy. It’s not controversial to say that defence contractors in the US operate at the behest of the US government. The government uses national security to control their IP and dictate who they’re allowed to do business with, ensuring that their commercial activity is aligned with policy objectives. The Chinese government effectively has that level of control over their entire economy.
Yes.. there's actually a board inside Huawei of state communist officials which Huawei refuses to divulge what decisions they are in charge of and how much control they have. They say it's a non-issue because all large chinese companies have such a board.
would you classify Tencent on the same level as Huawei? And if so, does that mean most American youth are plugged into League Of Legends & Fortnite, a Chinese Surveillance system ? lol
Truth is that we know that Apple, Microsoft, CISCO and pretty much all the US corporations cooperate with the US
intelligence services. Of course Huawei competes with Apple(among others) and CIA/NSA compete with their chinese counter-parts. Now, some of us are not very into communism so we rather prefer the US surveillance to the chinese one but make no mistake that the US corporations can't make their own choices when it comes to National Security. They have to obey the law and really they don't mind a powerful US government, why would they?
> most informative comment I’ve heard about Chinese business
So it seems like the whole comment is a repackaging and a commentary on someone else's opinion. I think it's an interesting thought exercise but it's also hard to derive what should one take away from this after reading.
The comparison to the CIA and Mossad is rather absurd. Huawei has grown because it has been able to offer similar or better networking equipment as competitors for lower prices. Recently, it has also been able to produce smartphones which are arguably superior to the iPhone and cheaper. In other words, they clearly are trying to outperform their competitors in their key markets. They're growing rapidly because they've succeeded in doing so.
As usual with China we are focused on the wrong issue and asking the wrong questions.
Who owns Huawei is irrelevant, who ultimately controls Huawei is the issue, but it’s a simple answer, the Chinese Government.
I was in China on business, we were meeting the one of the largest and most successful tech companies in China. We were meeting with the Chairman/CEO and his team. Everyone was introduced except one man, everyone basically acted like the guy wasn’t in the room. He just sat and listened until he heard something he didn’t like, he quickly took over the meeting, admonished the CEO, and insisted they we do as he said. For the remainder of the meeting the CEO and his team sat head facing the conference table, it was clear they were all terrified.
Once the key parts of the meeting were decided this man got up and left, the meeting quickly ended. I tried to get my Chinese colleagues to explain what happened, but everyone just blew me off.
A couple days later we were in Taiwan, and I got the full story. The man was the party official who guided the company. The guy made sure that the Chinese government’s interests were followed.
It’s China, thinking about things like it’s the West is stupid. Everything is owned by the government.
Ownership does not mean the same thing in non democratic states. The law and incorporation rules are always an approximation of what's applied in reality, but it is much more so in authoritarian states.
The real two questions are those of profit distribution and actual power, as in the ability to effect change. The latter is always constrained by the ruling party, no matter what the incorporation rules say, and no matter what the former (distribution of profits) is. It was the case in Soviet satellite countries too, except Soviet states were also harsher on profit distribution (communism).
Huawei responded to this study, and the author responded to Huawei's response [1]. Salient point:
> Our bottom-line conclusion about what it all means is just our opinion. If readers disagree with our conception of what employee ownership means and prefer Huawei’s, that’s their opinion. As long as everyone understands what the structure is, what label one puts on it is not ultimately that important.
So, in light of all I'm reading here about how much the Chinese state is really in control of their tech sector, can we still say that Bitcoin is decentralized?
Here is the current Bitcoin hashrate distribution:
(20%) BTC.com - owned by Bitmain, a Chinese IC design company founded in the first quarter of 2013, which specializes in research, development and sales for custom mining chips and miners.[0]
(12%) F2Pool - a Chinese mining pool, also referred to as "Discus Fish".[1]
(11.8%) Poolin - a multi-currency mining pool. Started by the founders of BTC.com.[2]
(11.6%) Antpool - also owned by Bitmain.
That's 55.4% of the network controlled by Chinese mining companies, which I would assume have a similar structure to Huawei?
I've heard a similar observation phrased slightly differently to describe Russia. If you're looking at a large Russian company, it goes, you're by definition looking at a company that has come to some kind of accommodation with the state -- because if they hadn't, the state would never have permitted them to get large.
> • We know nothing about the internal governance procedures of the trade union committee. We do not know who the committee members or other trade union leaders are, or how they are selected.
Well Huawei is pretty specific about the internal governance procedures of the trade union committee, who the committee members or other trade union leaders are, and how they are selected. https://imgur.com/a/mEFkgna
It obviously doesn't mean that anyone should believe them. But for a journal piece to say "We know nothing" rather than "There are no means of independently verifying Huawei's claim" make it hard to take them seriously scientifically.
I find the other extreme, as in the USA, more dangerous. Therefore the question "Who owns the US government?" could be asked too.
Someone could look into example of Boeing and the FAA. The more we learn about 737-Max and 787 Dreamliner certification the more it's obvious that Boeing is running the FAA.
Another example is the FDA. Good example here is Monsanto. While it was under US ownership everything was fine. Once it got sold to Bayer, suddenly stuff is carcinogenic. What I want to say is, that everybody knew since more than a decade before the transaction, that the stuff is carcinogenic. This seems to me like the FAA was protecting Monsanto before it was sold off.
Without a doubt, the executive structure of Huawei is opaque to any outsider and up for speculation. However, it should be easy to verify that Huawei does distribute its wealth to its employee and it does not share its profit to the state. So there is financial interest for the employees, at least. In any case, the company may choose to things that benefit the state, but that does not mean it doesn't benefit the company.
Not necessarily about China specifically, but why is corporate ownership so hard in general to deduce? Is it the case that public, queryable records simply do not exist, or they do exist but they require, say, manual steps to process through?
Would it make you feel any better if Huawei was owned 100% by a 27-year old college dropout wearing a hoodie?
Honestly. I find it hard to see the big problem here. Huawei is run by Ren Zhengfei, who is also the public face of the company, and besides running its daily operations also formally has veto rights.
Then there is a share scheme running through a union where the shareholders have no practical say but get a share of the company dividends. These shares are good enough for employees to take loans in and the issuance of shares has been a way for Huawei to finance itself.
With all this Huawei witch-hunting unfolding, the only thing comes to my mind is: What if Americans would apply the same scrutiny to its own companies, but then I realize most big-corps lobby their way around.
[+] [-] sprafa|6 years ago|reply
Essentially the state decides, let’s say high tech cutting edge batteries for storing renewable energy is where they want to invest in. They gather a few companies into a building that can do it or are interested. They then have state representatives who effectively ask “what do we need to know” and “who are the major players in the field.
In a month or so they come back again. They do big closed door presentation for all the companies in the building. Suddenly all the Chinese companies in the space start delivering R&D and eventually products that match some of the best stuff being done in the space. You could almost say they’ve learnt to copy it..
How do they do it? Industrial espionage, essentially, and building an industrial and intelligence infrastructure that allows for maximum impact of the state’s intelligence apparatus into the national economy. In a way it’s kind of brilliant.
I heard it described by an NSA analyst in a very interesting talk. I thought it was fascinating and speaks exactly to your point. The idea that we are competing with “free market” Chinese companies is a fiction that we’ve made up in our own minds. It’s just not how China works. And to be fair it’s been working gang busters for them.
edit since someone asked for it, here’s the talk - https://cybersecpolitics.blogspot.com/2017/04/fusion-centers...
My description was from memory so I hope I remembered it right.
[+] [-] tr3ndyBEAR|6 years ago|reply
I think it's a little misguided to say that China's innovation is solely due to corporate espionage. States have always been effective at spurring innovation when it's needed. We only need to look as far back as America's highly productive and innovative war economy to see that
[+] [-] ivanhoe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bb101|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hos234|6 years ago|reply
Sounds like magic if you have ever met government bureaucrats.
[+] [-] ajot|6 years ago|reply
Is this talk available somewhere? I would like to hear that!
[+] [-] joejerryronnie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antimora|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|6 years ago|reply
It's at 36 minute mark
[+] [-] high_5|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brainpool|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] DiogenesKynikos|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ordinaryradical|6 years ago|reply
I know some may reply that, for example, Lockheed effectively lives at this nexus also. It’s a good argument, and probably similar though not exactly the same in arrangement.
To me, the most interesting difference is that China has this kind of relationship with its major players regardless of industry, not just their defense contractors. So it doesn’t matter if you make cell phones, video games, toilet seats, ship hulls, or concrete—the whole concept of an enterprise not being interdependent on the state is a non-starter there. Whether it’s happening via backchannels to party officials or through ownership schemes like this one, the concept of private and public sector is so muddy there as to be almost meaningless.
To me, this tells us a lot more about IP infringement and espionage than what we usually read, because where the west likes to conceive of corporations as competing in a market in China it’s more useful to describe corporations as tools of statecraft.
Huawei wants us to think of them as competing with Apple because they both make cellphones. In reality, it’s as though the CIA or Mossad was competing with Apple—the aims of each may in fact be orthogonal to each other because market performance is not the real driver of the company’s decisions.
[+] [-] jdietrich|6 years ago|reply
The least cynical reading is that it's an expression of neo-Confucian values; those in a position of political, military or economic power have a broad belief in the importance of cooperation and "social harmony". If the NSA want to access all of Google's data, they hide an implant in a data center, put optical splitters on key fiber links or bribe a third party to provide a backdoor in a vital software dependency (PRISM and BULLRUN). If the PLA want Tencent's data or the NIS want Samsung's data they just ask for it, on the understanding that a) they're not really in a position to say no and b) cooperation with the state is a mutually beneficial quid-pro-quo.
[+] [-] xxxpupugo|6 years ago|reply
In East Asia, the Japanese model, that later adopted by both South Korea and China, relies on the exact opposite. The government directly involves in guiding and shaping the economy. And they are smart in doing so, with the corporations being their vehicles to implement its policy and they are ones to picking the winners. So it is not like Planned Economy like the Soviets did, instead they are trying to embrace and take advantage of the market to better advance its objectives. Instead, here in US, corporations are more sensitive and faster than the government to propose new economic initiatives, while government just sits aside as the shepherd to prevent disasters.
If you ever being able to read material from CJK countries, the government in general has a much bigger power and responsibility, and when problem happens, the societies' instinct is to push the government to act on it.
But Huawei might be still a special case among of these. It is a weird company though, which doesn't need to respond to its share holders and yet participating actively in open and competitive markets.
[+] [-] mytailorisrich|6 years ago|reply
There are state-owned companies, and there are private companies. Competition is intense.
The links of private companies with party officials is not caused by some cultural difference that makes boundaries fuzzy but by plain old unchecked power and corruption: The Party can make or break you so you need to stay on "friendly" terms with them.
This tends to happen everywhere there is no separation of powers and rule of law. In China it is simply perhaps better organised (or perhaps not).
A corollary is that being a Party member is useful for one's career. The Party also recruits as a way of keeping control.
[+] [-] nabla9|6 years ago|reply
The trick to success is to expose companies to free competition in the global markets while protecting and supporting them in every other way. State aid in financing loan guarantees was the norm. Protecting home markets from competition was the norm.
[+] [-] ma2rten|6 years ago|reply
Every company has different stakeholders, who have different interests. The German state of lower saxony has a 20% stake in VW. That doesn't mean that VW does not compete with other car makers.
[+] [-] throwaway94857|6 years ago|reply
Chinese institutions are all unified under a single structure, and that structure is the Communist (in name only) Party. Party members are embedded in every single important facet of society. Education, the military, the government, the private sector, it's all linked and unified by the party.
Now, we can compare this structure to the mammalian neocortex. The neocortex incorporates inputs from lower layers of the brain to form high level abstractions and integrations.
The West is basically functioning without a neocortex. Our institutions are not unified. There is no integrating layer above the corporate sector and government. In fact they are often at odds.
What I am saying is that China represents an existential threat to the entire project of the West. If China is able to outcompete us with their more advanced (?) organization, we will be forced to copy them or become irrelevant. This would mean doing away with free democracies and instituting a ruling party - a neocortex - to oversee the entire society.
I am not sure this would even be possible in diverse societies like those of the Western democracies. There is too much infighting and tribalism, at least right now.
That does not bode well for us.
But it's possible that cultural unity within our democracies may be sufficient to align the different parts of society to allow us to compete with China, without the formal superstructure of an all powerful Party.
[+] [-] kccqzy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AmericanChopper|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rgbrenner|6 years ago|reply
I learned this from Huawei's answer to the House Intel Committee in 2012. That committee produced a report which began Huawei's problems operating in the US: https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:rm226yb7473/Huawei-ZT...
[+] [-] abledon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|6 years ago|reply
Probably similar for Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, Bell Helicopter, Dyncorp, Navistar, and others as well.
[+] [-] kyllo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thefounder|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spion|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emtoor|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] microcolonel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|6 years ago|reply
How are US companies supposed to compete against such state backed corporations?
[+] [-] xster|6 years ago|reply
So it seems like the whole comment is a repackaging and a commentary on someone else's opinion. I think it's an interesting thought exercise but it's also hard to derive what should one take away from this after reading.
[+] [-] DiogenesKynikos|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watertom|6 years ago|reply
Who owns Huawei is irrelevant, who ultimately controls Huawei is the issue, but it’s a simple answer, the Chinese Government.
I was in China on business, we were meeting the one of the largest and most successful tech companies in China. We were meeting with the Chairman/CEO and his team. Everyone was introduced except one man, everyone basically acted like the guy wasn’t in the room. He just sat and listened until he heard something he didn’t like, he quickly took over the meeting, admonished the CEO, and insisted they we do as he said. For the remainder of the meeting the CEO and his team sat head facing the conference table, it was clear they were all terrified.
Once the key parts of the meeting were decided this man got up and left, the meeting quickly ended. I tried to get my Chinese colleagues to explain what happened, but everyone just blew me off.
A couple days later we were in Taiwan, and I got the full story. The man was the party official who guided the company. The guy made sure that the Chinese government’s interests were followed.
It’s China, thinking about things like it’s the West is stupid. Everything is owned by the government.
[+] [-] H8crilA|6 years ago|reply
The real two questions are those of profit distribution and actual power, as in the ability to effect change. The latter is always constrained by the ruling party, no matter what the incorporation rules say, and no matter what the former (distribution of profits) is. It was the case in Soviet satellite countries too, except Soviet states were also harsher on profit distribution (communism).
[+] [-] tepidandroid|6 years ago|reply
> Our bottom-line conclusion about what it all means is just our opinion. If readers disagree with our conception of what employee ownership means and prefer Huawei’s, that’s their opinion. As long as everyone understands what the structure is, what label one puts on it is not ultimately that important.
[1] https://thechinacollection.org/huaweis-ownership-huaweis-sta...
[+] [-] gooseus|6 years ago|reply
Here is the current Bitcoin hashrate distribution:
https://www.blockchain.com/en/pools
(20%) BTC.com - owned by Bitmain, a Chinese IC design company founded in the first quarter of 2013, which specializes in research, development and sales for custom mining chips and miners.[0]
(12%) F2Pool - a Chinese mining pool, also referred to as "Discus Fish".[1]
(11.8%) Poolin - a multi-currency mining pool. Started by the founders of BTC.com.[2]
(11.6%) Antpool - also owned by Bitmain.
That's 55.4% of the network controlled by Chinese mining companies, which I would assume have a similar structure to Huawei?
[0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitmain
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/F2Pool
[2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Poolin
[+] [-] bdz|6 years ago|reply
https://www.huawei.com/minisite/who-runs-huawei/en/
https://twitter.com/huawei/status/1157213584985751553
[+] [-] smacktoward|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Leary|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xster|6 years ago|reply
Well Huawei is pretty specific about the internal governance procedures of the trade union committee, who the committee members or other trade union leaders are, and how they are selected. https://imgur.com/a/mEFkgna
It obviously doesn't mean that anyone should believe them. But for a journal piece to say "We know nothing" rather than "There are no means of independently verifying Huawei's claim" make it hard to take them seriously scientifically.
[+] [-] ragerino|6 years ago|reply
Someone could look into example of Boeing and the FAA. The more we learn about 737-Max and 787 Dreamliner certification the more it's obvious that Boeing is running the FAA.
Another example is the FDA. Good example here is Monsanto. While it was under US ownership everything was fine. Once it got sold to Bayer, suddenly stuff is carcinogenic. What I want to say is, that everybody knew since more than a decade before the transaction, that the stuff is carcinogenic. This seems to me like the FAA was protecting Monsanto before it was sold off.
[+] [-] wenbin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tech-historian|6 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/technology/who-owns-huawe...
[+] [-] waterdownship|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oh_sigh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chvid|6 years ago|reply
Honestly. I find it hard to see the big problem here. Huawei is run by Ren Zhengfei, who is also the public face of the company, and besides running its daily operations also formally has veto rights.
Then there is a share scheme running through a union where the shareholders have no practical say but get a share of the company dividends. These shares are good enough for employees to take loans in and the issuance of shares has been a way for Huawei to finance itself.
[+] [-] bayesian_horse|6 years ago|reply
So in terms of control, the ownership of the company doesn't mean a lot in any case.
[+] [-] floatingatoll|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] postit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]