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Meng Wanzhou's father—Huawei's reclusive founder, Ren Zhengfei— was a corporate legend in China. He had a reputation as a long-term strategist, and his military-esque aphorisms were widely quoted. Starting from humble beginnings, Ren had worked his way up through the military before setting up a humble telephone switch venture that had shot straight to the top. It was either an astonishing feat of innovation or, as some people muttered, too good to be true. There were rumors about the company pursuing obscured projects in Iran and North Korea. There were fears that Huawei products might contain "back doors" that could let overseas spies burrow their way in. There were questions of whether the company was controlled by China's government, despite Huawei's protests that it was an independent, privately owned company. Some US officials, with a touch of melodrama, were calling Huawei no less than the greatest threat to American democracy.

 

Ren protested that he couldn't possibly be involved in such things. He was, he said, only a maker of pipes—a humble vocation not unlike that of a plumber. Not everyone saw things this way. Sure, Huawei might make pipes of a sort, but it was not water flowing through them. What flowed through these pipes was telephone calls, emails, internet traffic, text messages, video calls, corporate accounting, medical records, wills and testaments, love letters, family photographs, police intelligence, government secrets. In a word: data. The most valuable commodity of the information age. And Huawei was the largest supplier of these pipes—by a long shot.

And there was something else here. The question of Huawei wasn't merely a question of business; it was also a question of belief. When the Soviets had sent Sputnik 1 into the skies in 1957, it had shaken Americans to the core. There was nationwide soul-searching: How could Moscow have gained the technological edge with its stodgy Communist methods? The collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to put that debate to rest, affirming the brittleness of Communist rule and the superiority of Western liberal democracy. As for China, it had been a technological leader centuries ago, inventing the compass, gunpowder, and paper. But it had fallen behind in the fifteenth century, and the prospect that it would ever catch up again seemed unlikely. Until now. The world was having another Sputnik moment. And this time the Sputnik was Huawei.

Huawei was filing more patent applications than any other company on earth. Huawei was number one in 5G. Huawei was number one in smartphones. It was breaking ground in artificial intelligence. It pulled in more in annual sales than Disney and Nike combined, and it employed more people than Apple. The rise of such an absolute corporate juggernaut was not supposed to be possible through Communism. But it had happened. It was the kind of thing that made people reconsider what they knew to be true. They were reconsidering if free trade really made everyone wealthier. They were reconsidering if history did end with Western-style democracy. They were reconsidering if the source of innovation really was college dropouts' garages and not the state picking winners and losers. Because if so, then how did a company like Huawei exist?

* * *

Days after Meng's detention, Beijing struck back. Two Canadians, both named Michael, were detained in China, thrown into solitary detention, and accused of espionage. The simmering US-China trade war had exploded into full-fledged hostage diplomacy.

Amid the fear and uncertainty that followed, something strange happened. Invitations began trickling out to major news organizations: The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, BBC. They were all invited to come to China and meet Ren Zhengfei himself. It was the first time in his life that Huawei's secretive founder had thrown open his doors to the foreign press. So it was with a great deal of intrigue, and a little trepidation, that the journalists arrived, one after another, in the megacity of Shenzhen on China's southern coast.

As they drove through the smoggy outskirts of Shenzhen, the sea of factories must have seemed to go on forever. There was one assembly line after another, churning out yo-yos, ziplock bags, scuba wet suits, electric toothbrushes, ultrasonic plastic welders, arch-support insoles, and everything in between. This was the place called the world's factory floor. Finally, the foreign reporters emerged at a lakeside hill. This was where Ren had built his Garden of Eden. There was a life-size replica of Versailles, with statues of white horses galloping around a fountain at its entrance. Nearby, the red turrets of Heidelberg Castle soared. A little red train chugged cheerfully from castle to castle. One hundred and fifty Russian painters had been hired to paint the walls and ceilings of the massive halls with Renaissance-style murals. In one hall, there was a re-creation of the caryatids from Delphi, the mysterious female figures holding up the sky with their heads. Exquisitely dressed young women playing the lute. There was also a sprawling vista of the Battle of Waterloo. Outside, black swans glided on a lake—a reminder from Ren to his employees to always be on the lookout for a "black-swan event," a term for an extremely unlikely but disastrous occurrence.