The People’s Republic of Techno-Optimists

Just 19 miles from the beach in Humen, southern China, where the burning of opium in 1839 started the Opium Wars and China’s “Century of Humiliation” lies Huawei’s ornate campus at Songshan Lake. Earlier this month when I visited Huawei, it was impossible not to marvel at just how far China had come. The campus was a stunning replica of European towns, dotted with over a hundred cafés, which appeared to convey unironically both Huawei’s global ambitions and its eagerness to learn from the West. In many of the palace-like buildings, as I peered at the technologies, it was clear that the company sits at the heart of China’s artificial intelligence boom, powering it with Ascend chips and the HarmonyOS ecosystem that underpins millions of devices and cars, all enabled by its telecom networking gear.