Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday that employees of Chinese telecom giant Huawei have “collaborated on research projects with Chinese armed forces personnel, indicating closer ties to the country’s military than previously acknowledged.”
Huawei executives responded by claiming they are unaware of any such joint projects with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
Bloomberg investigative reporters found at least ten research projects since 2006 where Huawei workers collaborated with the PLA:
They include a joint effort with the investigative branch of the Central Military Commission — the armed forces’ supreme body — to extract and classify emotions in online video comments, and an initiative with the elite National University of Defense Technology to explore ways of collecting and analyzing satellite images and geographical coordinates.
Those projects are just a few of the publicly disclosed studies that shed light on how staff at China’s largest technology company teamed with the People’s Liberation Army on research into an array of potential military and security applications.
Bloomberg culled the papers from published periodicals and online research databases used mainly by Chinese academics and industry specialists. The authors of the treatises, which haven’t been reported in the media previously, identified themselves as Huawei employees and the company name was prominently listed at the top of the papers.
Bloomberg noted there could be many more joint Huawei-PLA projects that are classified or have been kept offline.
The report is highly problematic for Huawei, which has long insisted it has no relationship whatsoever with Chinese military or intelligence agencies. Huawei has even asserted it has some form of immunity to China’s cybersecurity law, which expressly states all Chinese companies must cooperate fully with intelligence agents upon demand. The United States alleges Huawei equipment is inherently unsafe because it could be compromised by the Chinese government for information-gathering or espionage purposes.
Bloomberg noted that while the Chinese military has denied a working relationship with Huawei, most recently and prominently at the regional Shangri-La Dialogue held in Singapore this month, the Chinese Defense Ministry declined to comment immediately on the new revelations. A Defense Ministry spokesman scoffed at the Bloomberg report in an interview with Reuters.
“As everyone knows, Huawei is a private company that has developed on its own. There is no so-called Chinese military background,” he said, obliquely referring to company founder Ren Zhengfei’s stint as a PLA military engineer during his impoverished youth. The normally reclusive Ren has given several interviews over the past year insisting that his military background and membership in the Chinese Communist Party do not compromise Huawei’s independence.
Bloomberg was unable to contact any of the Huawei employees involved in the ten military projects it discovered.
Huawei executives responded to the report by claiming they were unaware of any work performed for the PLA.
“As far as I know, we don’t have military cooperation projects because we are a company dedicated to providing communications systems and (information and communications technology) solutions for civil use,” Huawei chief legal officer Song Liuping told CNBC on Thursday.
“My understanding is we don’t have any projects that relate to the military cooperation category. Neither do we customize products or solutions for the military,” he said.
A Huawei spokesman gave CNBC a similar statement that the company “is not aware of its employees publishing research papers in their individual capacity.”
“Huawei only develops and produces communications products that conform to civil standards worldwide, and does not customize R&D products for the military,” a company spokesman assured Reuters.
None of these statements addressed why the company’s name was featured prominently in the papers Bloomberg discovered.
Bloomberg’s Tim Culpan noted in a Thursday op-ed that private corporations contributing to military projects are hardly unusual, but Huawei’s problem is that it has labored for years to convince international customers that it has no connection at all to a Chinese military intelligence apparatus that is very active in cyber-espionage and information theft.
“Now Huawei is left with three choices: deny its ties to the PLA, play them down, or claim ignorance. Judging from its initial response to the Bloomberg News story, it seems to have opted for the last choice. Should this shift to denial, Huawei’s credibility worldwide might diminish,” Culpan wrote, predicting the Chinese company might pay a price for acting “coy.”