
Huawei’s Yearslong Rise Is Littered with Accusations of Theft and Dubious Ethics - chvid
https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-yearslong-rise-is-littered-with-accusations-of-theft-and-dubious-ethics-11558756858
======
chvid
I am amazed on how weak the accusations are. A ringtone? Some guy who thinks
he can patent the idea of a camera attached to a smartphone?

A hitpiece like this could have been written about just about any big tech
company. And it is leaving out the story of how Huawei committed its true
crime: That within some fields (5G notably) it is today a lot more advanced
and cheaper than its competitors.

~~~
sigmar
They note that Huawei's patent contained Quintel's name in the documents. How
are those accusations weak? Seems like impressively strong evidence.

Between T-mobile's tappy (resulted in indictment), Quintel's antennas, CNEX
Labs, Tekelec Inc, motorola, cisco source, and Akhan Semiconductor's Diamond
Glass[1](unmentioned in this piece) seems like there is quite a bit of
evidence that Huawei has a company wide directive to steal IP.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-04/huawei-
st...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-04/huawei-sting-offers-
rare-glimpse-of-u-s-targeting-chinese-giant)

~~~
wyxuan
I talked to a senior Huawei exec and he said that tappy is not a good example
of IP theft. The tester literally attempted to walk out with the machine. You
can't get any more sloppy then that.

Instead he said that the worker was really pressured by his bosses into
delivering results.

That's not to say that there are broader problems with IP theft at Huawei
though.

~~~
gabaix
Trying to confirm your point: because the company was careless in letting an
employee walk out, this was a lesser theft?

I haven’t heard a case where a burglar gets a reduced sentence because the
house was left unlocked.

The fact that this comes from a Huawei senior exec speaks a lot about their
company culture.

------
jvanderbot
My friends in telcom from years ago would regularly tell us about H techs who
would come install equipment. And while doing so would disassemble every rack
and switch in the room and photograph everything.

Thats an unprovable allegation, but I know these folks to be reliable sources
of information. Having read about the internal incentives for techs providing
IP intel and outright rewarding of theft, I'm convinced.

~~~
woah
Why wouldn’t Huawei just buy a switch? Why would the customer tolerate someone
spending 10x longer on an install and taking apart all their other crap? For
that matter why were they able to take apart the other switches at all?
Wouldn’t that have taken the system down? Were they storing inactive equipment
in their live rack? None of this makes a lot of sense.

~~~
xenospn
Yeah, the only way I can see that happening is if there's a bunch of unused
equipment in the room that you can take apart without unplugging - but since
when do you let a bunch of foreign techs hang out in one of your server rooms
by themselves? Not likely.

~~~
jvanderbot
According to these guys, they'd come in to do an installation at 2-3AM
(standard time for maintaining a cell network), but security was lax and they
would be left to do their own thing mostly unsupervised. These were smaller
shops that were later bought out by the big handful recognize today. They were
dumb. Maybe they let it happen, but it takes two to tango.

According to the particular story that I might be foggy on, the engineer
responsible for the station and surrounding stations came in to check in on
the installation unannounced, and the people on site were not really aware or
concerned that they were in back working. The engineer found out what was
going on, and everyone shrugged, saying that what harm could they do, etc etc.

------
nailer
Anecdote. May be untrue. Don't trust everything you read online, etc.

A friend was a 7 year Ericsson employee (ending in 2012). In his opinion,
Ericsson's networking equipment was universally acknowledged as having slow
deployment times. Nokia's stuff was much faster to deploy. When Huawei hired
the ex-Nokia engineers at 2.5x their previous salary, they asked them how
Nokia did particular tasks. The engineer would say 'The best way of doing this
is...' and get cut off: 'we want to know exactly how Nokia does this, not
anything different'. All the Nokia customers moved to Huawei's kit. After a
couple of years of extraction Huawei would fire the ex-Nokia engineer saying
'we have everything we need from you'.

Again, might be bullshit.

~~~
johnchristopher
I remember reading an article about how a Chinese company would hire European
bakers to demonstrate how they bake breads ad nauseum until they could
reproduce and automate each steps perfectly.

The thinking was "they [chinese] have no imagination so they stick to known
processes and don't deviate".

Don't really know what to make of that.

~~~
late2part
Which is why this trope about China ruling the world is crap. Generally
speaking they are good at copying, reverse engineering, and cheap labor. The
country's MO is to steal designs and process and implement better. When the
west finally figures out how to stop letting China steal/copy - then the West
will continue innovating, and China won't have anything to make.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Except the same empty arguments were made against Japan, and were levelled
against the nations producing the imported cotton cloth that people were
starting to buy in preference to long established Lancashire cotton mills.

"Don't buy Japanese electronics or motorcycles, they only make poor cheap
copies" would be commonly heard in the seventies and early eighties. They
easily - and quickly - moved past that phase, as will China. They mostly
already have.

In each case the complaining nations have been happy to supply tooling and
equipment to enable this.

~~~
dfrage
I absolutely don't know _anyone_ who was saying that about Japanese
electronics in the 1970s in my part of US flyover country. Sony was considered
to be one of the very best in the world, and my family was greatly
disappointed in the 1980s when Sony moved a lot of manufacturing to Mexico and
they had to fix many cold solder joints on TV sets. If you wanted a good reel
to reel tape deck, Teac was your first choice.

One thing left out of this formulation is that it was realized at some point,
certainly by the 1970s for electronics, that the Japanese added "and improve",
which no one says about the Chinese. Who are said to have a pattern more than
a century old of steadily decreasing quality until the customer complains.
Different culture, vastly different societal trust levels, Japan high, China
low, different results.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Maybe US experience was different - I certainly remember that impression
through the seventies, and the reputation mainly being with the Euro makes -
Dual, Grundig, Quad, Tannoy etc.

Sony TV had reputation for poor colour. I think they modified their NTSC
designs to PAL, or shared something with the US standard. Enough to be noticed
by customers anyway. That reputation stuck around a while, but was fading when
Walkman arrived (early 80s?), and by the end of the decade they had a solid
reputation among the best TVs. Couldn't tell you when they adopted PAL
"properly". By the end of the 80s, Japanese makes had cornered the mass
market, and were chipping away at the higher end, and many of the Euro brands
fading, or disappearing.

~~~
dfrage
Sounds like it. None of the brand names you mention were known in my part of
the US at the time, and I don't even recognize any of them today except for
Gundig.

For TVs, Japan very conveniently for the US shares the same NSTC standard,
their only issue is that half of Honshuu, the big island, is on 50 cycle
power, the other on 60 cycles (both at 110-120V for consumers like the US with
our 60 cycle power). So with their two biggest markets being satisfied with
the same gear, I can well imagine the fragmented European market suffering.

Note also SECAM for France, countries it influenced, and apparently Eastern
Europe per Wikipedia either initially so its subjects under Soviet domination
couldn't receive PAL signals from across the Iron Curtain, or because it's
insensitive to amplitude and phase variations from long cable or microwave
links.

What about radios? While Sony pioneered the small and inexpensive lo-fi radio
with their own transistors, this was very big in the 1950s through the 1960s,
but by the time I was paying attention in the 1970s no Japanese company had a
commanding lead in radios in the US, they were pretty much a low end commodity
by then, except for shortwave sets, which weren't big in the US by then.

The first Walkman was released in Japan in 1979, the brand and general format
was _very_ big in the US by the early 1980s:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkman)

Sony and Phillips also closely collaborated on the Compact Disc, its capacity
was supposedly dictated by one Sony guy's insistence that Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony as conducted by Herbert von Karajan would fit on one (you have to
split a movement between sides for a single vinyl LP release, that was _very_
annoying).

They also scored a big early hit two years later in late 1984 with a very
small CD player, the head of the project estimated how small was possible with
current technology, made a block of wood that size, and challenged his
engineers to make one no bigger. Ah, the "Discman", it was per Wikipedia and
my memory very important in the early adoption of CDs:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discman)

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Interesting, I didn't know Japan was also on NTSC. That explains the way PAL
turned out. I found a reference on Wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitron)

"The decoder inside the UK-sold Sony color Trinitron sets ... had an NTSC
decoder adapted for PAL. ... Any phase errors could then be compensated for by
using a tint control knob on the front of the set, normally unneeded on a PAL
set". Presumably also applied in other PAL countries too, or they entered
those markets a little later.

TV's to choose in 1979 were probably British Ferguson, Dutch Philips, and
German Grundig. In 1989, replace Ferguson (I think they were taken over
sometime in the 80s) with Sony. Philips were the most likely to innovate and
bring out new ideas, like Laserdisc (with MCA) or V2000 video recorders, that
was best quality of the three, and first format to leave the market.

I also only started being aware in the 70s. Portable Radios seems a very
similar picture to the US - Sony was here, but no one really had the market.
So plenty from Philips, Braun - with that iconic design that gave the iPod
design, Brother at the more expensive end, along with lots of cheaper makes
from both Europe and Japan. ITT was about the only non-professional US make I
can remember with much presence here. There's bound to be one I missed. Short
wave was Grundig and Philips for the hobbyists, with a few from Brother.

Brother are still going, and doing quite well in DAB radios, especially with
models that are digital versions of 50s and 60s successes. Tannoy is the
common generic term for a PA system here, they moved into home audio and
speakers. They're long bought out into a group making hifi and speakers, along
with Quad and Wharfedale. German Dual are still around, and were one of _the_
mid range but quality audio and turntable makers of late 70s and early 80s.
Now I think just expensive turntables after a buyout or failure or two.

Walkman was, of course, huge. I think that and the ghetto blaster fashion
pushed all the Japanese brands right to the front of the market in the early
80s. Even though the boombox was also a Philips idea they were never the most
desired brand. Philips kept their reputation for TV though, with some of the
best late-CRT models.

So Japan and Sony race ahead, Sony's former mixed reputation being thoroughly
forgotten, and in the process completely transformed the market. Few of the
older brands could keep up. All the Japanese makes became a success - Pioneer,
Sanyo, Sharp, Aiwa, Marantz, Panasonic/Technics, Hitachi etc, even though one
or two weren't very good yet! Then Sony upped the stakes with the remarkable
pro Walkman models - that few could respond well to.

Japan ended up taking the reputations for just about everything except high-
end hifi and notably speakers - where they struggled, but even there they made
some inroads. Several Japanese brands started designing and making speakers in
Europe or using Wharfedale or Tannoy. I think Panasonic/Technics and Denon may
still.

I'm sure I forgot a few bits of the timeline. :)

------
codedokode
Wikipedia article [1] says that US has been also involved in industrial
espionage:

> In 1999, Enercon, a German company and leading manufacturer of wind energy
> equipment, developed a breakthrough generator for wind turbines. After
> applying for a US patent, it had learned that Kenetech, an American rival,
> had submitted an almost identical patent application shortly before. By the
> statement of a former NSA employee, it was later discovered that the NSA had
> secretly intercepted and monitored Enercon's data communications and
> conference calls and passed information regarding the new generator to
> Kenetech

Also, other article [2] mentions that West had earlier stolen a secret of
porcelain manufacturing from China.

Are those the examples of proper, not dubious "ethics" that we should learn
from? Did Europeans returned the stolen secret?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial_espionage)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage#Origins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage#Origins)

------
whooshee
As an aside, Huawei poured a lot of funds in R&D, and those scientists and
mathematicians they hired from Russia/France etc,. helped significantly to
their breakthroughs.

------
mensetmanusman
Accusations? They sold networking equipment with accompanying Cisco manuals.
Ha.

Big picture, is the world better off with Huawei’s rise? It depends on your
perspective.

If you care about the global environment, Huawei’s costs are so low because
they do not have to satisfy environmental standards as they do in the west...
That is the basis of most cost differentials outside of labor supply/demand.

------
lowdose
We are reading a lot about Huawei lately and it almost all seems to boil down
to how "evil" their business practices are. Is this WSJ in the Overton window
spinning a manufactured consent?

~~~
Theodores
Did you read the comments for the article? This has the width of the Overton
Window laid bare for you. The consent has already been manufactured! Nobody
dare cross the line and say how cool they are with Huawei products.

We have short memories, not so recently the Koreans were the ones doing all
the IP theft, but nowadays Samsung is legit. Or you can go further back to
when everything except and IBM PC (or Apple) was a clone.

Going further back, in the world of automotive, when a special product comes
out, e.g. the MINI in the UK, the first thing Ford does is to buy one and take
it to pieces, cost the whole package and work out how it is done.

There are places I have worked where there have been cupboards full of rival
products, tested to destruction. It is called research.

What is quite interesting with the narrative is that Huawei have got there in
the execution of 5G and they are allegedly ahead. Imagine if Huawei got to
setup a colony on Mars first, we could complain that they stole Elon Musk's
ideas and throw toys out of prams, to ignore accomplishments and execution.

Clearly the Overton Window is defined on this, and woe betide anyone that
ignores it. So how does one avoid flamewar? Humour always helps. IS there any
original IP in this WSJ article? Is it actually novel? Have they stolen
content from other articles? Have they nicked content from the Washington
Post? Their Huawei trolling is far from investigative journalism.

~~~
jcims
I just have a meta question. Was there a recent article or something that
brought the term 'Overton window' into common use? I did a little digging and
it seems like it's been a term for a few decades, but I don't recall ever
seeing it before this year. Now I see it used all the time.

~~~
chvid
The TV Show "Billions".

~~~
jcims
That’s definitely it, timing is dead on. Thanks!

~~~
Bootvis
It was commonly used on Slashdot before (where I learned the concept).

~~~
jcims
Interesting. Used to love slashdot, have an account at the bottom end of the
five digit range, but i cant do it any more.

------
vneumanarc
Just huawei? Isn't that the case for china's rise overall? Wasn't the basis of
US-China relations the past 50 years a simple transfer of technology/capital
for cheap labor/lax environmental regulations? We looked the other way while
china took our technology and money. And they looked away as we exploited
cheap labor and lax environmental law. It was a wage, technology, capital and
environmental law arbitrage. It terribly skewed the wealth/income inequality
in both countries, it destroyed large segments of the US ( rust belt ), it has
been an environmental disaster and it's significantly altered the global power
balance. But at least the elites got ridiculously wealthy.

For 50 years, the wsj and the ny times defended this. Bloomberg defended this
since their inception in the early 80s. It's odd to see the entire
establishment media shift from supporting it to now suddenly attacking it.
Also, you would think independent media would offer differing opinions rather
than speaking with the same voice. But it's always complete support or
complete rejection as if someone flips a switch on and off.

"Theft and dubious ethics" has been the basis of the US-China relationship
from the very beginning and it went both ways. This is something everyone and
their mother knew from the very beginning. Why did it take 50 years for the
wsj and the rest of the media to figure it out.

If the wsj is concerned with "theft and dubious ethics", are they planning on
an expose' of the US-Saudi relation and US-Israeli relation? Maybe in another
50 years?

~~~
ordu
Yeah, it strongly reminds me the media of USSR. They switched narratives in a
perfect unison with politics like that. Sometimes they even did it ahead of
politics preparing ground for changes in politics.

I wonder what the mechanics of it might be in a democratic society. It was
easy to do in USSR: top-down structure allowed state to rule media by orders.
But democracy is more nuanced than that I believe. At least I've never
witnessed ahead-of-time switch in narratives of democratic media.

~~~
vneumanarc
It's in all states. It just becomes more noticable in times of stress (
economic, military, societal ).

Go read about the mccarthy era, the red scare before that or the yellow peril
before that. Or go read about how how china and the chinese were viewed
pre-1970 to how the media changed perceptions during the 1970s with deng's
visit, etc as they prepared to open trade relations. Read about how chinatowns
historically were stereotyped as the worst kind of ghetto with drugs, crime,
etc by the media for much of history. During the 1970s, the media turned
chinatown from a ghetto to a hip ethnic enclave.

The same thing with the natives, blacks, mexicans, japanese, germans,
russians, chinese, italians, catholics, irish, jews, etc in the US. There were
periods where they were demonized and then some switched got flipped and the
media softened or completely reversed their stance. Why and at whose request,
who knows.

Go look at sino-soviet relations. They are "best buds" and their respective
media praised each other. Things go sour and the media pushes anti-sino and
anti-russo rhetoric. Same thing with sino-american relations. The interests of
the ruling class determine what perceptions the media creates.

Remember when Bush looked into putin's eye and saw a good man? The media was
praising putin for stabilizing russia and improving living conditions? It was
only 15 years ago, but in media terms, it feels like a lifetime ago. How
things quickly change.

~~~
chvid
I think it is the Trump 2020 campaign.

Essentially Trump has figured out he can win the 2020 election by going to war
with China.

So it is anti-China all over; from smearing of political opponents to policy
to information campaigning.

------
HillaryBriss
What's the big deal here? Couldn't other countries just steal technology back?
e.g. couldn't a 5-eyes country consortium just rip off Huawei's 5G technology
and run with it in their own markets?

~~~
jmull
Stealing stuff is OK because other people could also steal stuff?

I don’t think that’s a valid point.

~~~
HillaryBriss
ok. but it might be a path to profitability. i mean, what is all this
rhetorical heat and drama really about? it's about making money. it's not
truly about ethics. US business is not exactly a lofty ethical model to hold
up for global admiration. if accusing a big company of theft and security
breaches can get them locked out of your market, that's one less competitor.

