The Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei grew from humble origins, founded in 1987 by a former PLA officer, into one of the largest firms in the world. Then in 2019, it was added to the U.S. Entity List, amid suspicion it could provide a backdoor into American networks for the Chinese Communist Party. That was just one salvo in a wider war of words (and action) between the U.S. and China during the first Trump administration. As the second Trump term looms, we're delighted to host Washington Post journalist Eva Dou, in conversation with tech specialist Dan Wang, to talk about Huawei's story — as well as the TikTok ban, cyber attacks and other aspects of tech rivalry across the Pacific — on the occasion of the publication of her new book House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company (Portfolio, 2025).

House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company (Portfolio, 2025) is a deeply researched study of how China’s most successful high-tech company was built, and how it has ended up at the center of the U.S.-China rivalry. Told as a chronological narrative starting from the birth of Huawei’s founder in the 1940s, the book tracks the trajectory of a company both singular and representative of its era in China, through political upheaval, economic boom, and more recently, high-stakes diplomatic crisis. The book details the management practices that have made Huawei a corporate juggernaut, while exploring the governmental interests in telecommunications networks that are both a source of the company’s power and a reason it is viewed in a number of countries with distrust.

Eva Dou is an award-winning journalist based in Washington, D.C., writing about technology policy for The Washington Post. She was previously a foreign correspondent for a decade for the Post and The Wall Street Journal. Much of her work focuses on the intersection of technology and geopolitics. She is the author of House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company (Portfolio, 2025).

Dan Wang is a fellow at the Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center and a technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics. His research focuses on China’s technology capabilities and how quickly they’re improving, as part of the East Asian industrialization story. He has contributed to several magazines, and writes a popular annual letter at his website. He was born in Toronto, lived in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai, and is currently based in New Haven.

This event is presented by China Books Review.