Huawei is a private company. The logic of this argument is that no Chinese company whatsoever is reliable. There's literally nothing Huawei can possibly do to allay the fears of people who take this attitude.
I don't think anyone who knows anything about China believes "private company" means anything in that country. The founder was literally a PLA and a huge amount of private ventures have deep ties to both the CCP, either in funding, talent or both.
It's not a coincidence that APT steals IP and "somehow" Chinese companies have advanced 20 years in research.
Ren Zhengfei retired from the PLA before he founded Huawei. I don't see people accusing companies founded by US veterans of being "literally the US government". Yes the PRC is a single-party authoritarian state, but it has a whole set of laws defining private companies vs state-owned enterprises.
The only concern about Huawei is that it cannot disobey Chinese government orders issued against Huawei's will. (Sounds familiar? All those companies that dropped Huawei due to an US government order? How so many were being apologists for Google because "Google didn't have a choice"?) Saying Huawei is "literally the Chinese government" without providing proof and asking us to simply follow the rhetoric by suspending all disbelief is a very lazy and dishonest tactic.
I believe. How many former PLA members in China right now? It is a job. How is it different from someone worked in U.S. Army before? It basically tells that you know nothing about China.
"Private company" means a lot in China. The state-owned enterprises operate very differently from the privately owned businesses. Tencent and Alibaba are dramatically different from state-owned enterprises.
> The founder was literally a PLA
Along with literally millions of other Chinese people. Being in the PLA when he was young means next to nothing.
My concern is that even if the boardroom in Huawei and every single employee all the way down operated in good faith, there is nothing from stopping the Chinese government from taking control of the technology if they wanted to. This is a government that is currently operating concentration camps.
The concern is legit. That's why Huawei is the most audited telecom equipment provider. Also that's why U.S. has hacked into Huawei years ago. I am pretty sure if there is anything, it would have surfaced years ago. In a way, the whole thing has made Huawei more reliable than other provider if you object monitoring from U.S. government.
Every company is subject to pressure from their country's intelligence agencies. If an American company is ordered to spy on its customers, there's little it can do. This happened with Lavabit, which Edward Snowden used as an encrypted email provider. The US government forced the founder of Lavabit to hand over the website's SSL private key.
If you're afraid of a foreign country using its technology providers to spy on you, you have two options:
1. Don't use technology from that country.
2. Only use technology from that country that you are confident you can audit.
There's nothing Huawei can do, beyond what it's already done (offer to open up its tech for audits by foreign intelligence services), to allay the fundamental fears you're expressing. In the same manner, there's almost nothing American companies can do to allay the fears of foreigner countries (or US citizens, for that manner) that their tech won't be used by American intelligence agencies. The logical conclusion of this is that every country must develop its own technological base, and that's not a future I want to live in.
