Huawei opens its gates in widening PR assault

March 07, 2019 00:00:00

DONGGUAN (China), Mar 06 (AFP): Chinese telecom giant Huawei gave foreign media a peek into its state-of-the-art facilities Wednesday as the normally secretive company steps up a counter-offensive against US warnings that it could be used by Beijing for espionage and sabotage.

Huawei has kicked off the year with an aggressive PR campaign that has seen reclusive founder Ren Zhengfei suddenly give a series of interviews with foreign media to deny the company was a threat, while executives have dismissed the US warnings as baseless.

The charm offensive went into another gear Wednesday as Huawei welcomed media to its tightly-guarded facilities in southern Guangdong province.

"I don't think this is any change in their DNA so much as a Beijing communist-style 'we are going to pound you into submission'," Christopher Balding, a China expert at Fulbright University in Ho Chi Minh City, told the news agency.

Journalists toured a huge factory floor with 35 highly automated assembly lines in Dongguan, where an array of robotic arms put together a Huawei P20 smartphone every 28.5 seconds.

Reporters were then taken past rows of mammoth buildings to the Huawei Independent Cyber Security Laboratory, whose director Wang Jin rejected fears that the company could serve as a Trojan horse for Chinese authorities.

"Our most basic red line is that our products cannot have any backdoors," Wang said.

Foreign journalist visits are hardly routine at a headquarters where high-tech labs and manufacturing facilities employ 60,000 people, but these are unusual times for the company.

The United States says Huawei equipment could be manipulated by China's Communist government to spy on other countries and disrupt critical communications.

Washington is urging governments to shun the company just as the world readies for the advent of ultra-fast 5G telecommunications, an advancement that Huawei was expected to lead and which will allow wide adoption of next-generation technologies like artificial intelligence.