RED INC.

This is the story of China's technological rise told through the lens of its most powerful business, Huawei Technologies Co., and its founder and CEO, Ren Zhengfei.

Born in 1944 in the last days of Japan's colonization of China, Ren Zhengfei is the oldest person in China to still be playing an active, vital role in geopolitics. His life trajectory serves as a unique narrative vehicle to tell the story of modern China. Huawei was an active participant in a surprising number of the country's historic moments, from the legalization of private businesses, to the Hong Kong handover, to the construction of the Great Firewall.
By documenting the long-standing intimate ties between Huawei and the Chinese Communist Party, the book shows how business and government work together in an authoritarian state, and how companies fit into China's growing international ambitions under Xi Jinping. Through its technologies, Huawei has helped solidify and enforce China's growing police state, in which outspoken entrepreneurs like Jack Ma have been silenced, tycoons have disappeared, and executives must put patriotism above profit. What has been the true cost of the "Made in China" business model? The result has been the rise of a cohort of truly formidable Chinese companies like Huawei, that have learned and borrowed from their Western rivals, then been turbocharged by the Chinese state. There are lessons here for Western businesses and consumers, as governments around the world seek a new model of globalization.

Eva Dou is an investigative journalist who has reported primarily on Asia's high-tech industry for the past decade. She joined the Washington Post as its China business correspondent in 2020, following seven years as a Wall Street Journal correspondent in China and Taiwan.