Ren Zhengfei Quotes

Just because the US is trying to suppress us does not mean we do not recognize it as a teacher. This will lead to isolation.

Be straightforward and ask any questions you want. I will be very frank in my answers, including with any of your trickier questions. Don't worry. I like how frank Americans are. You aren't afraid to ask any question you want. I was a fan of the US when I was young. Today, I still believe the US is a great nation. Your advanced institutions, flexible innovation mechanisms, clearly-defined property rights, and respect and protection of individual rights have attracted the world's best talent to invest and innovate in the US. Billions of people have participated in this process. Without your openness, you wouldn't have been able to develop into the world's strongest power in just over 200 years.

The Chinese government has already clearly said that it won't install any backdoors. And we won't install backdoors either. We're not going to risk the disgust of our country and of our customers all over the world, because of something like this. Our company will never undertake any spying activities. If we have any such actions, then I'll shut the company down.

There's no way the US can crush us. The world cannot leave us because we are more advanced. Even if they persuade more countries not to use us temporarily, we can always scale things down a bit.

A famous person once said that the easiest way to bring down a fortress is from within and the easiest way to reinforce it is from outside. Our fortress has let its guard down, and complacency has kicked in. But pressure from the US has forced us to be united and stick together. We're united as one now, and we're determined to make better products. This has eased the burden on me personally, because our people are working harder than ever before. They're out there clamoring louder than I am, so I can relax a bit and have more time to speak highly of the US.

If our engineers became politicians, Huawei would have collapsed. Engineers should focus on developing good products. They don't need to read about politics. What's the point of them caring about political issues? If our engineers are all out protesting, who is going to pay them?

There has been no step forward in history that has been easy. We have gone through many twists and turns in the past century.

If the lights go out in the West, the East will still shine. And if the North goes dark, there is still the South. America doesn't represent the world. America only represents a portion of the world.

Academic freedom is the foundation of innovation. The freedom to have different academic ideas and to study whatever you want is very important. Undoubtedly, the US has the world's most innovation-friendly environment. Thanks to the Internet, people have easier access to information. Science and engineering papers have nothing to do with ideology, so they can be published and shared all over the world.

Well, since day one, we have always been a strong supporter of globalization in our operations, so that we can serve the global community by collaborating across the global value chain. A long time ago, however, we realized that there would be all kinds of uncertainties and conflicts between the US and Huawei. We needed to be prepared, so that we wouldn't collapse and could be self-reliant when the US chose not to sell to us. Today, I can say that it won't be a problem for us to survive short term, but I'm concerned whether we will still be a global leader in three to five years. We will delve deep into this topic, and it has become part of our agenda.

Is China a part of the world? Yes. Therefore, our insistence on globalisation also includes the domestic market. We cannot be closed. We must stay open.

I've always been a pretty open person, actually, but I like to focus on internal management more than external publicity. I really get US culture, and many of our company's management systems were inspired by those in the US.

We can license technologies and production techniques. Whoever gets the technologies can develop new things based on them.

Huawei has no access to the data and we don't need the data. So from this point of view, what the US has been saying just doesn't hold up. It's like trucks. Trucks can be used to do bad things. What to transport in a truck is up to the driver, not the truck maker. You can't blame the truck maker for any bad things that are done using the truck. The same applies to us. We are like a truck maker.

Technology is increasingly complex. So technological expertise is more important than trust, because without expertise, products cannot be made, and trust will be meaningless. When a product is made, there will always be someone who will trust it despite what others say. Countries that have decided to use the product will find that it helps with their economic development, and this will remind everyone else that if they don't use this technology, they will be left behind.