On the morning of December 1, 2018, the vast central plaza in Mexico City was thronged by tens of thousands of people. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a left-wing populist, had just been sworn in as Mexico’s 58th president. In his inaugural address, he thumbed his nose at decades of neoliberal rule and promised a sweeping political and economic transformation of Mexico.
The people converging on the Plaza del Zócalo from all over the country weren’t the only ones who sensed opportunity in the new administration. At that very moment, high over the Pacific Ocean, a Chinese executive named Meng Wanzhou was winging her way from Shenzhen to Mexico.
Meng is chief financial officer of Huawei, the world’s largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment and second-largest maker of smartphones. Though Huawei’s Android handsets are all but unknown in the United States, they are everywhere in Mexico, as they are in China, South Asia, and the Middle East. Even more ubiquitous in some 170 countries around the world are pieces of Huawei equipment that ordinary consumers rarely touch: arrays of radio antennas perched atop cell towers and electronic base stations that sit beneath them on the ground, converting between digital and radio signals. By some accounts, about 40 percent of the world’s population relies on Huawei equipment. But even with 191,000 employees and $108 billion in annual revenue, Huawei remained hungry for growth.
That desire, however, faced a formidable obstacle: the US government. For years, the US had pressured Mexico to block Huawei’s expansion within its borders. Washington argued that Huawei’s technology was an elaborate Trojan horse for Chinese government surveillance—that installing its networking equipment was akin to giving Beijing’s Ministry of State Security the ability to spy on Western computer and wireless networks.
López Obrador’s victory, however, suggested a new political moment and an opening for Huawei to strike. Meng was on her way to Mexico to secure a new beachhead for the next generation of wireless infrastructure, known as 5G. The transformation to a 5G network promised inconceivably fast wireless speeds but required a new and denser network of cellular base stations. And Huawei was the world leader in supplying precisely that equipment.
But before Meng could lay the groundwork in Mexico, she made a stop in Vancouver, Canada.
The 47-year-old executive—who also goes by the names Sabrina Meng or Kathy Meng—made her way through customs and immigration wearing a dark tracksuit. At some point, she must have realized that something was amiss. Perhaps it was when one of the two Canadian Border Services officers who questioned her stepped away to speak on his cell phone. Maybe it was when the officers began searching the two carts of luggage she’d brought along, or when two female officers came to escort her into a secure portion of the airport’s border facility.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police finally told her she was under arrest. “Me?” she responded. “Why would I have an arrest warrant?” The officers said they were acting on US charges that she and her company had allegedly violated sanctions against Iran. “You’re saying because of my company, you’re arresting me?” she responded. Could she at least call her family?
The answer was firm: “You cannot.”
The officers placed each of her four devices—a Huawei phone, an iPhone, a rose gold iPad, and a pink MacBook—in a secure bag that would block any attempts to wipe them remotely.
Back in Shenzhen, the home of Huawei’s global headquarters, Joe Kelly was awakened by a phone call. A veteran of British telecommunications, Kelly heads the company’s international media affairs. On the other end of the line was a reporter: Sabrina has been arrested in Canada at the request of the US government. Do you have any response? Kelly sighed and offered the only comment he could muster: “I haven’t had my coffee yet.”
Kelly grasped immediately the enormity of what was happening. Meng isn’t just the CFO of Huawei; she is also the daughter of the company’s founder, 75-year-old billionaire Ren Zhengfei. The US had jabbed sharp elbows at Huawei before. But this was a dramatic escalation of hostilities.
Over the next several months, that escalation would continue. Huawei would find itself caught in a geopolitical vise as the United States seemed to project all of its technological anxiety about China and globalization onto a single company.
For the US, China represents both a critical trading partner and a leading foreign adversary. US companies see China as a market with a billion consumers and as home to the factories that make everything from Apple iPhones to children’s books. It’s also an authoritarian superpower that exerts an ambiguous level of control over its private sector. As tech firms like Huawei become ever more indispensable across the globe, American leaders have, not unreasonably, become possessed by the fear that Chinese technology will offer a ruthless Beijing many “backdoors” into Western affairs of state, security, and commerce. And in the past two years, the US has, at least in the case of Huawei, begun to toy with a policy of complete technological quarantine.
The stakes are enormous. Huawei itself is a huge player in the global telecommunications industry—so large that as Huawei goes, so goes the interconnected world. A full US ban on Huawei products could mark the beginning of the end of a one-world internet. It could calve the world into two separate tech ecosystems, one in North America and parts of Europe and the other across Asia and the Southern Hemisphere. The former would be dominated by Nokia, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, and the latter by Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu.
The Trump administration’s escalating fight has left US companies that supply Huawei reeling and left Huawei wondering if it can ever count on access to US supply chains again. About the only thing that is clear is that the Trump administration’s fight isn’t really about Huawei at all.
“There’s a big geopolitical battle going on,” one Huawei executive told me, “one that’s far above Huawei’s pay grade.”
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