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"Welcome," the Huawei staffers said, "to Huawei's R&D campus."

 

Now out walked Ren himself. If you believed some folks in Washington, he was one of the most dangerous men in the world. He didn't look so standing before them: a wizened little old man in a blue leisure suit and pastel shirt, spouting aphorisms and jokes through a translator.

The visiting journalists were keen to ask Ren about his background, about Huawei's ownership, about the psychedelic vision of the European castles, about Huawei's business in Iran, about the detention of his daughter. But most of all, they wanted to ask him over and over, in every possible permutation, the unanswerable question: Did Huawei help the Chinese government spy?

"We are a company that sells water taps and pipes," Ren said. "How can anyone ask for water from a hardware store like us?"

PART I

A country without its own program-controlled switches is like one without an army.—Ren Zhengfei, July 20, 1994

CHAPTER ONE

THE BOOKSELLER

THE REN FAMILY: 1937-1968

Ren Moxun sold "good books." That was what he and his friends called patriotic literature. They were seeking to inspire their countrymen to heroism at a time when it was urgently needed. They'd considered names like Advancement Bookstore and Pioneering Bookstore before finally settling on July Seventh Bookstore. The reference was obvious: Earlier that year, on July 7, 1937, Japanese troops had crossed the Marco Polo Bridge, captured the capital, and continued their invasion of China. World War II would not come for Europe for another two years, when Adolf Hitler invaded Poland. But here in China, the war was already upon them. Ren Moxun opened up the bookstore in the small town of Rongxian, in southern Guangxi Province, and threw himself into the war effort.

Ren Moxun was around twenty-seven at this time, and he had a high forehead, long cheeks, and bushy eyebrows. The only one among his siblings to have attended university, he cultivated a professorial air and wore horn-rimmed spectacles. He revered books, schooling, and the written word, a predisposition he would pass down to his seven children. At the time he opened his bookstore, reading was still a hobby for the privileged elite. If you pulled five people off the street at random, you'd be lucky if one could read. Chinese script was difficult to learn: it had no alphabet, and you had to memorize each word, one by one. Still, there was enough interest in Rongxian for a bookstore. Ren Moxun stocked revolutionary titles from a supplier in Guilin: Karl Marx's Das Kapital, Vladimir Lenin's The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, the complete works of the modern Chinese thinker Lu Xun. He and his colleagues placed a bench at the front so that frugal students could sit and read for free. Outside the bookstore, they propped up a blackboard to scrawl news of the war, something of an unofficial village newspaper. They started a political reading club too, which gathered for spirited discussions.

In his day job, Ren Moxun served as an accountant for a Nationalist military factory supporting the fight against Japan. The Nationalists, China's rulers at the time, were also embroiled in a civil war against Mao Zedong's Communists, who were seeking to overthrow them with the help of the peasantry. As they fought Japan's invasion, the two sides had brokered a delicate truce, an agreement Ren Moxun strongly endorsed. When one faction of Communist revolutionaries in his town began advocating to end the détente with the Nationalists, he denounced them as traitors. These were tense times. People disagreed on what was the right path for the nation, on who was friend or foe, on whether a book was a "good book" or not. One day in March 1938, some Nationalist officers searched the bookstore and pulled out a big pile of books that they demanded not be sold. Ren Moxun and his colleagues found a clever workaround. They piled the banned books into a vitrine and scrawled a sign on it: INSIDE THIS CABINET ARE BANNED BOOKS. As it turned out, the books inside the cabinet sold briskly.

The July Seventh Bookstore was shut down by the Nationalists in the second half of 1939. Its owners held a fire sale to get a last batch of good books out to the people. Ren Moxun considered traveling to Yan'an to join Mao's Communists but found the roads impassable. So he crossed to the rolling hills of the neighboring province, Guizhou, where he found work as a teacher.

Guizhou Province is a hilly region slightly smaller than Missouri, set inland from China's southwestern border with Vietnam. Monsoons sweep the subtropical region each summer, watering the terraced paddies of sticky rice. Cold drizzles continue through the winter. The area's indigenous people were the Bouyei, who spoke their own language and also inhabited northern Vietnam. For centuries, China's emperors considered the area an impoverished borderland where even cooking salt was sometimes in short supply. Even in the modern day, Guizhou retains the reputation of a hardship posting for officials.

In Guizhou, Ren Moxun met a seventeen-year-old named Cheng Yuanzhao. With big brown eyes, round cheeks, and a broad smile, she was also bright and good with numbers. They married, and Cheng Yuanzhao soon became pregnant.

Their son was born in October 1944, and they named him Ren Zhengfei. It was an ambiguous name. Zheng meant "correct," and fei meant "not." "Right or wrong" would be a fair translation. It wasn't like the common, straightforward boys' names. Jiabao meant "family treasure." Jianguo meant "build the nation." But what did a name like his mean?