During a bizarre military-style ceremony that highlighted Huawei’s ties to the Communist Party of China (CPC), the tech company launched a new business unit. It will focus on developing surveillance technology powered by artificial intelligence. The new front will focus on streamlining the struggling Chinese company’s efforts to become a world leader in spy technology with the potential to be deployed worldwide.
The ceremony belies Huawei’s public relations and lobbying campaigns that strive to hide the well-founded notion that the company is loyal to the Chinese Communist Party.
In recent years, the telecom giant has come under fire from Trump-era sanctions and a campaign to persuade foreign governments to stop using Huawei products in their communications networks. The Trump administration has warned US allies and other countries that Huawei is part of the CCP’s spy apparatus. These claims were substantiated by subsequent reports linking Huawei to party surveillance networks.
Last year, amid international restrictions, Huawei’s revenue continued to decline, although its profitability grew as it turned to other sectors. Part of the effort to transform Huawei in response to Western bans is reorganizing the company on multiple fronts, each focused on a different emerging industry.
During the above-cited ceremony on May 26, Huawei inaugurated this “mechanized vision” unit, which does AI-based computer image analysis. This initiative is essential for the company to enter the surveillance technology market. But the highlight of the event was the pugilistic way in which the company presented its work.
According to a report linked to the communist party, shared with the National Review through trade watch group IPVM, the ceremony featured a line of uniformed Huawei employees giving a raised fist to the CCP on stage. Behind them was a banner that read:
Application integration, cloud coordination, building a leading competitor! Deepen channel distribution to help customers succeed on the front line. Stay focused and competitive to live and die with the Corps. Machine Vision Corps, Victory! Huawei, Victory! Victory! Victory!
Huawei’s new recruits also shouted the slogan. In addition to Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei, his daughter and company CFO Meng Wanzhou was in attendance. Meng was in Canadian custody but was released last year after the US dropped an extradition request in an apparent deal with Beijing.
For years, Huawei has worked to present itself as a normal, private tech company, conducting a multi-million US lobbying campaign, forming partnerships with major media outlets, and even gaining support from former senior US government officials.
But the “mechanized vision” ceremony is just the latest example that contradicts this attempt to look like an “ordinary” company. In addition to Huawei’s internal party committee — a body that promotes CCP orthodoxy within nominally private companies — the party’s influence can be seen in Ren’s efforts to shape his company to reflect the regime’s culture and organizational structures. As the IPVM noted in its report on the event, Ren’s exhortation to Huawei employees to “firmly remember their mission” is a reference to an old communist party slogan.
Huawei aims to enter this new market to compete with other Chinese surveillance giants such as Hikvision and Dahua, both of which are subject to US sanctions for their role in mass spying on Uighurs. This effort could have global implications, with the export of technology sold by a company with clear loyalty to the CCP.
The department head of Huawei’s new 2020 unit, Duan Aiguo, promised at the time that this would be the top company in the industry in five years. Although the Chinese security media report said it was not certain that Duan would officially lead this new body, he was seen at the ceremony sitting with the core of corporate leadership.
Duan would be a likely choice for the role, considering his work on Huawei’s “smart city” initiative. The company says it has rolled out about 160 of these safe city and smart city systems, covering facial recognition technology and license plate scanning, around the world. A report by Privacy International, published in November of last year, asks for more information about these programs, which are in place in Uganda, Myanmar and other developing countries, as well as developed Western countries such as Spain.
Another project, between Huawei and a company affiliated with Russia’s Sberbank, also provides more evidence about Huawei’s international ambitions in the surveillance sector. The two companies jointly developed a platform that combines their technological capabilities.
An October 2020 press release stated, “The VisionLabs–Huawei solution can detect faces in videos and photos, extract biometric templates that identify faces, and match them to the available database. panel and other devices as image sources”. Naturally, Huawei’s new “mechanized vision” unit is expected to continue to improve this type of technology, including for applications that could be exported to smart cities in foreign countries.
Huawei already has extensive experience in adapting surveillance-focused products to the needs of Chinese authorities. Last year, the Washington Post detailed Huawei’s work with party officials in providing voice monitoring software, technical management programs for re-education and forced labor camps in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Shanxi, and facial recognition software for use in Xinjiang cities.
*JIMMY QUINN is National Security Correspondent at National Review
©2022 National Review. Published with permission. original in English
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