Huawei has faced allegations that its products contain backdoors for Chinese government espionage and domestic laws require Chinese citizens and companies to cooperate with state intelligence when warranted. Huawei executives denied these claims, saying that the company has not received requests by the Chinese government to introduce backdoors in its equipment, would refuse to do so, and that Chinese law does not compel them to do so.
Huawei employed a complex system of agreements with local state-owned telephone companies that seemed to include illicit payments to the local telecommunications bureau employees. During the late 1990s, the company created several joint ventures with their state-owned telecommunications company customers. By 1998, Huawei had signed agreements with municipal and provincial telephone bureaus to create Shanghai Huawei, Chengdu Huawei, Shenyang Huawei, Anhui Huawei, Sichuan Huawei, and other companies. The joint ventures were actually shell companies, and were a way to funnel money to local telecommunications employees so that Huawei could get deals to sell them equipment. In the case of Sichuan Huawei, for example, local partners could get 60–70 percent of their investment returned in the form of annual 'dividends'.
Martin Thorley of the University of Nottingham noted that a "company of Huawei's size, working in what is considered a sensitive sector, simply cannot succeed in China without extensive links to the Party". Klon Kitchen has suggested that 5G dominance is essential to China in order to achieve its vision where "the prosperity of state-run capitalism is combined with the stability and security of technologically enabled authoritarianism". Nigel Inkster of the International Institute for Strategic Studies suggested that "Huawei involvement in the core backbone 5G infrastructure of developed western liberal democracies is a strategic game-changer because 5G is a game-changer", with "national telecoms champions" playing a key role, which in turn is part of China's "ambitious strategy to reshape the planet in line with its interests" through the Belt and Road Initiative. On 7 October 2020, the U.K. Parliament's Defence Committee released a report concluding that there was evidence of collusion between Huawei and Chinese state and the Chinese Communist Party, based upon ownership model and government subsidies it has received.
Huawei has a strong rapport with, and support from, the Chinese government. The Chinese government has granted Huawei much more comprehensive support than other domestic companies facing troubles abroad, such as ByteDance, since Huawei is considered a national champion along with Alibaba Group and Tencent. For instance after Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou was detained in Canada pending extradition to the United States for fraud charges, China immediately arrested Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in what was widely viewed as "hostage diplomacy". China has also imposed tariffs on Australian imports in 2020, in apparent retaliation for Huawei and ZTE being excluded from Australia's 5G network in 2018. In June 2020, when the UK mulled reversing an earlier decision to permit Huawei's participation in 5G, China threatened retaliation in other sectors by withholding investments in power generation and high-speed rail. A House of Commons defence committee found that "Beijing had exerted pressure through "covert and overt threats" to keep Huawei in the UK's 5G network". US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reassured the UK saying "the US stands with our allies and partners against the Chinese Communist Party's coercive bullying tactics," and "the US stands ready to assist our friends in the UK with any needs they have, from building secure and reliable nuclear power plants to developing trusted 5G solutions that protect their citizens' privacy".
The "optics of Beijing's diplomats coming to [Huawei]'s defense" in the European Union has also contradicted Huawei's claims that it is "fully independent from the Chinese government". In November 2019, the Chinese ambassador to Denmark, in meetings with high-ranking Faroese politicians, directly linked Huawei's 5G expansion with Chinese trade, according to a sound recording obtained by Kringvarp Føroya. According to Berlingske, the ambassador threatened with dropping a planned trade deal with the Faroe Islands, if the Faroese telecom company Føroya Tele did not let Huawei build the national 5G network. Huawei said they did not know about the meetings. China's ambassador to Germany, Wu Ken, warned that 'there will be consequences' if Huawei was excluded, and floated the "possibility of German cars being banned on safety grounds".
The Wall Street Journal has suggested that Huawei received approximately "$46 billion in loans and other support, coupled with $25 billion in tax cuts" since the Chinese government had a vested interest in fostering a company to compete against Apple and Samsung. In particular, China's state-owned banks such as the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China make loans to Huawei customers which substantially undercut competitors' financing with lower interest and cash in advance, with China Development Bank providing a credit line totaling US$30 billion between 2004 and 2009. In 2010, the European Commission launched an investigation into China's subsidies that distorted global markets and harmed European vendors, and Huawei offered the initial complainant US$56 million to withdraw the complaint in an attempt to shut down the investigation. Then-European Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht found that Huawei leveraged state support to underbid competitors by up to 70 percent.
Read the full text
In November 2019, Huawei filed defamation lawsuits in France against a researcher at the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research, a TV presenter, and a production company, for the researcher's statements on a TV show that Huawei was controlled by the Chinese state and by the CCP.
Allegations of military and intelligence ties
In 2011, a report by the Open Source Enterprise detailed its "suspicions over potential close links between Huawei and the Chinese Government," such as former chairwoman Sun Yafang's prior employment by the Ministry of State Security (MSS)'s Communications Department.
In 2019, Ren Zhengfei stated "we never participate in espionage and we do not allow any of our employees to do any act like that. And we absolutely never install backdoors. Even if we were required by Chinese law, we would firmly reject that". Chinese Premier Li Keqiang was quoted saying "the Chinese government did not and will not ask Chinese companies to spy on other countries, such kind of action is not consistent with the Chinese law and is not how China behaves." Huawei has cited the opinion of Zhong Lun Law Firm, co-signed by a CCP member, whose lawyers testified to the FCC that the National Intelligence Law doesn't apply to Huawei. The opinion of Zhong Lun lawyers, reviewed by British law firm Clifford Chance, has been distributed widely by Huawei as an "independent legal opinion", although Clifford Chance added a disclaimer stated that "the material should not be construed as constituting a legal opinion on the application of PRC law". Follow up reporting from Wired cast doubt on the findings of Zhong Lun, particularly because the Chinese "government doesn't limit itself to what the law explicitly allows" when it comes to national security. "All Chinese citizens and organisations are obliged to cooperate upon request with PRC intelligence operations—and also maintain the secrecy of such operations", as explicitly stipulated in Article 7 of the 2017 PRC national intelligence-gathering activities law. Tim Rühlig, a Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, observed that "Not least in the light of the lack of the rule of law in China, but also given the clarity of the Intelligence Law, this legal opinion [by Clifford Chance] does not provide any substantial reassurance that Huawei could decline to cooperate with Chinese intelligence, even if the company wanted to do so".
Experts have pointed out that under General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping's "intensifying authoritarianism" since the National People's Congress promulgated a new national intelligence law in 2017, as well as the 2014 Counter-Espionage Law, both of which are vaguely defined and far-reaching. The two laws "[compel] Chinese businesses to work with Chinese intelligence and security agencies whenever they are requested to do so", suggesting that Huawei or other domestic major technology companies could not refuse to cooperate with Chinese intelligence. Jerome Cohen, a New York University law professor and Council on Foreign Relations adjunct senior fellow stated "Not only is this mandated by existing legislation but, more important, also by political reality and the organizational structure and operation of the Party-State's economy. The Party is embedded in Huawei and controls it". One former Huawei employee said "The state wants to use Huawei, and it can use it if it wants. Everyone has to listen to the state. Every person. Every company and every individual, and you can't talk about it. You can't say you don't like it. That's just China." The new cybersecurity law also requires domestic companies, and eventually foreign subsidiaries, to use state-certified network equipment and software so that their data and communications are fully visible to China's Cybersecurity Bureau. University of Nottingham's Martin Thorley has suggested that Huawei would have no recourse to oppose the CCP's request in court, since the party controls the police, the media, the judiciary and the government. Klon Kitchen has suggested that 5G dominance is essential to China in order to achieve its vision where "the prosperity of state-run capitalism is combined with the stability and security of technologically enabled authoritarianism".
In 2019, Henry Jackson Society researchers conducted an analysis of 25,000 Huawei employee CVs and found that some had worked or trained with China's Ministry of State Security, the People's Liberation Army (PLA), its academies, and a military unit accused of hacking US corporations, including 11 alumni from a PLA information engineering school. One of the study researchers says this shows "a strong relationship between Huawei and all levels of the Chinese state, Chinese military and Chinese intelligence. This to me appears to be a systemized, structural relationship." In a report by academics Christopher Balding of Fulbright University and Donald C. Clarke of George Washington University, a person "simultaneously held a position at Huawei and a teaching and research role at a military university through which they were employed by the Chinese People's Liberation Army...a section in the PLA that is responsible for the Chinese military's space, cyber, and electronic warfare capabilities". Charles Parton, a British diplomat, said this "give the lie to Huawei's claim that there is no evidence that they help the Chinese intelligence services. This gun is smoking." Huawei said that while it does not work on Chinese military or intelligence projects, it is no secret that some employees have a previous government background. It criticized the report's speculative language such as 'believes', 'infers', and 'cannot rule out'. In 2014, the National Security Agency penetrated Huawei's corporate networks in China to search for links between the company and the People's Liberation Army. It was able to monitor accounts belonging to Huawei employees and its founder Ren Zhengfei.
U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission member Michael Wessel said: "If there's a locksmith who's installing more and more locks on the doors in a community and suddenly there's a rash of silent robberies, at some point the locksmith becomes a person of interest. Huawei around that time became a significant entity of interest". A Bloomberg News report stated that Australian intelligence in 2012 detected a backdoor in the country's telecom network and shared its findings with the United States, who reported similar hacks. It was reportedly caused by a software update from Huawei carrying malicious code that transmitted data to China before deleting itself. Investigators managed to reconstruct the exploit and determined that Huawei technicians must have pushed the update through the network on behalf of China's spy agencies. Huawei said updates would have required authorization from the customer and that no tangible evidence was presented. China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the accusation a "slander". Australian telecom operators Optus and Vodafone disputed that they were compromised. Senior security officials in Uganda and Zambia told The Wall Street Journal that Huawei played key roles enabling their governments to spy on political opponents. Several IT sources told Le Monde that inside the African Union headquarters, whose computer systems were supplied by Huawei, data transfers on its servers peaked after hours from January 2012 to January 2017, with the AU's internal data sent to unknown servers hosted in Shanghai. In May 2019, a Huawei Mediapad M5 belonging to a Canadian IT engineer living in Taiwan was found to be sending data to servers in China despite never being authorized to do so, as the apps could not be disabled and continued to send sensitive data even after appearing to be deleted. At the end of 2019, United States officials disclosed to the United Kingdom and Germany that Huawei has had the ability to covertly exploit backdoors intended for law enforcement officials since 2009, as these backdoors are found on carrier equipment like antennas and routers, and Huawei's equipment is widely used around the world due to its low cost. The United Kingdom established a lab that it ran, but which was paid for by Huawei, to evaluate Huawei equipment. After eight years of study, the lab did not identify any Huawei backdoor, but concluded that Huawei's equipment had bugs that could be exploited by hackers.
Timeline
Yale University economist Stephen Roach stated in 2022 that there was no hard evidence to support the allegations of Huawei having a backdoor for industrial espionage other than one arguable instance, which was when UK telecom Vodafone disclosed in 2011 that its Italian fixed line network contained a security vulnerability in its Huawei-installed software. Huawei fixed the vulnerability at Vodafone's request. There was no report of any suspicious data capture or systems control activity. Vodafone was satisfied with the outcome and thereafter increased its reliance on Huawei as an equipment-supplier.
A 2012 White House-ordered security review found no evidence that Huawei spied for China and said instead that security vulnerabilities on its products posed a greater threat to its users. The details of the leaked review came a week after a US House Intelligence Committee report which warned against letting Huawei supply critical telecommunications infrastructure in the United States.
Huawei has been at the center of concerns over Chinese involvement in 5G wireless networks. In 2018, the United States passed a defense funding bill that contained a passage barring the federal government from doing business with Huawei, ZTE, and several Chinese vendors of surveillance products, due to security concerns. The Chinese government has threatened economic retaliation against countries that block Huawei's market access.
Similarly in November 2018, New Zealand blocked Huawei from supplying mobile equipment to national telecommunications company Spark New Zealand's 5G network, citing a "significant network security risk" and concerns about China's National Intelligence Law.
Huawei was involved in developing the United Kingdom's 5G network, which initially led to serious policy and diplomatic disagreements between the UK and the United States, which opposed Huawei's involvement. Between December 2018 and January 2019, German and British intelligence agencies initially pushed back against the US' allegations, stating that after examining Huawei's 5G hardware and accompanying source code, they have found no evidence of malevolence and that a ban would therefore be unwarranted. Additionally, the head of Britain's National Cyber Security Centre (the information security arm of GCHQ) stated that the US has not managed to provide the UK with any proof of its allegations against Huawei and also their agency had concluded that any risks involving Huawei in UK's telecom networks are "manageable". The Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC), set up in 2010 to assuage security fears as it examined Huawei hardware and software for the UK market, was staffed largely by employees from Huawei but with regular oversight from GCHQ, which led to questions of operating independence from Huawei. On 1 October 2020, an official report released by National Cyber Security Centre noted that "Huawei has failed to adequately tackle security flaws in equipment used in the UK's telecoms networks despite previous complaints", and flagged one vulnerability of "national significance" related to broadband in 2019. The report concluded that Huawei was not confident of implementing the five-year plan of improving its software engineering processes, so there was "limited assurance that all risks to UK national security" could be mitigated in the long-term. On 14 July 2020, the United Kingdom Government announced a ban on the use of company's 5G network equipment, citing security concerns. In October 2020, the British Defence Select Committee announced that it had found evidence of Huawei's collusion with the Chinese state and that it supported accelerated purging of Huawei equipment from Britain's telecom infrastructure by 2025, since they concluded that Huawei had "engaged in a variety of intelligence, security, and intellectual property activities" despite its repeated denials. In November 2020, Huawei challenged the UK government's decision, citing an Oxford Economics report that it had contributed £3.3 billion to the UK's GDP.
In March 2019, Huawei filed three defamation claims over comments suggesting ties to the Chinese government made on television by a French researcher, a broadcast journalist and a telecommunications sector expert. In June 2020 ANSSI informed French telecommunications companies that they would not be allowed to renew licenses for 5G equipment made from Huawei after 2028. On 28 August 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron assured the Chinese government that it did not ban Huawei products from participating in its fifth-generation mobile roll-out, but favored European providers for security reasons. The head of the France's cybersecurity agency also stated that it has granted time-limited waivers on 5G for wireless operators that use Huawei products, a decision that likely started a "phasing out" of the company's products.
In February 2020, US government officials claimed that Huawei has had the ability to covertly exploit backdoors intended for law enforcement officials in carrier equipment like antennas and routers since 2009.
In mid July 2020, Andrew Little, the Minister in charge of New Zealand's signals intelligence agency the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), announced that New Zealand would not join the United Kingdom and United States in banning Huawei from the country's 5G network.
Sanctions, bans, and restrictions
Before the 2020 semiconductor ban
In August 2018, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 (NDAA 2019) was signed into law, containing a provision that banned Huawei and ZTE equipment from being used by the US federal government, citing security concerns. Huawei filed a lawsuit over the NDAA 2019 in March 2019, alleging it to be unconstitutional because it specifically targeted Huawei without granting it a chance to provide a rebuttal or due process. The federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in February 2020, concluding that U.S. Congress acted within its powers by including the restriction in the NDAA 2019.
Additionally, on 15 May 2019, the Department of Commerce added Huawei and 70 foreign subsidiaries and "affiliates" to its Entity List under the Export Administration Regulations, citing the company having been indicted for "knowingly and willfully causing the export, re-export, sale and supply, directly and indirectly, of goods, technology and services (banking and other financial services) from the United States to Iran and the government of Iran without obtaining a license from the Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)". This restricts US companies from doing business with Huawei without a government license. Various US-based companies immediately froze their business with Huawei to comply with the regulation.
The May 2019 ban on Huawei was partial: it did not affect most non-American produced chips, and the Trump administration granted a series of extensions on the ban in any case, with another 90-day reprieve issued in May 2020. In May 2020, the US extended the ban to cover semiconductors customized for Huawei and made with US technology. In August 2020, the US again extended the ban to a blanket ban on all semiconductor sales to Huawei. The blanket ban took effect in September 2020. Samsung and LG Display were banned from supplying displays to Huawei.
After 2020
The sanctions regime established in September 2020 negatively affected Huawei production, sales and financial projections. However, on 29 June 2019 at the G20 summit, the US President made statements implicating plans to ease the restrictions on US companies doing business with Huawei. Despite this statement, on 15 May 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce extended its export restrictions to prevent Huawei from producing semiconductors derived from technology or software of US origin, even if the manufacturing is performed overseas. In June 2020, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) designated Huawei a national security threat, thereby barring it from any US subsidies. In July 2020, the Federal Acquisition Regulation Council published a Federal Register notice prohibiting all federal government contractors from selling Huawei hardware to the federal government and preventing federal contractors from using Huawei hardware.
In November 2020, President Donald Trump issued an executive order prohibiting any American company or individual from owning shares in companies that the United States Department of Defense has listed as having links to the People's Liberation Army, which included Huawei. In January 2021, the Trump administration revoked licenses from US companies such as Intel from supplying products and technologies to Huawei. In June 2021, the FCC voted unanimously to prohibit approvals of Huawei gear in US telecommunication networks on national security grounds.
In June 2021, the administration of Joe Biden began to persuade the United Arab Emirates to remove the Huawei Technologies Co. equipment from its telecommunications network, while ensuring to further distance itself from China. It came as an added threat to the $23 billion arms deal of F-35 fighter jets and Reaper drones between the US and the UAE. The Emirates got a deadline of four years from Washington to replace the Chinese network. A report in September 2021 analyzed how the UAE was struggling between maintaining its relations with both the United States and China. While Washington had a hawkish stance towards Beijing, the increasing Emirati relations with China have strained those with America. In that light, the Western nation has raised concerns for the UAE to beware of the security threat that the Chinese technologies like Huawei 5G telecommunications network possessed. However, the Gulf nations like the Emirates and Saudi Arabia defended their decision of picking Chinese technology over the American, saying that it is much cheaper and had no political conditions.
After President Joe Biden signed into law the Secure Equipment Act of 2021, on 25 November 2022, the FCC issued a ban on Huawei for national security reasons, citing the national security risk posed by the technology owned by China. In May 2024, the U.S. Department of Commerce revoked some export licenses that allow Intel and Qualcomm to supply Huawei with semiconductors.
In March 2025, the FCC opened an investigation into Huawei and other Chinese companies regarding operations in the U.S. in violation of restrictions.
Stockpiling of processors
Before the 15 September 2020 deadline, Huawei was in "survival mode" and stockpiled "5G mobile processors, Wi-Fi, radio frequency and display driver chips, and other components" from key chip suppliers and manufacturers, including Samsung, SK Hynix, TSMC, MediaTek, Realtek, Novatek, and RichWave. Even in 2019, Huawei spent $23.45 billion on the stockpiling of chips and other supplies in 2019, up 73% from 2018. In May 2020, SMIC manufactured 14 nm chips for Huawei, which was the first time Huawei used a foundry other than TSMC. In July 2020, TSMC confirmed it would halt the shipment of silicon wafers to Huawei and its subsidiary HiSilicon by 14 September.
On its most crucial business, namely, its telecoms business (including 5G) and server business, Huawei has stockpiled 1.5 to 2 years' worth of chips and components. It began massively stockpiling from 2018, when Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of Huawei's founder, was arrested in Canada upon US request.
Development of processors
In late 2020, it was reported that Huawei had planned to build a semiconductor manufacturing facility in Shanghai that did not involve US technology. The plan may have helped Huawei obtain necessary chips after its existing stockpile became depleted, which would have helped the company chart a sustainable path for its telecoms business. Huawei had also planned to collaborate with the government-run Shanghai IC R&D Center, which is partially owned by the state-owned enterprise Hua Hong Semiconductor. Huawei may have been purchasing equipment from Chinese firms such as AMEC and NAURA Technology Group, as well as using foreign tools which it could still find on the market.
In August 2023, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), a US trade association, alleged that Huawei was building a collection of secret semiconductor-fabrication facilities across China, a shadow manufacturing network that would let the company skirt US sanctions. Huawei was receiving an estimated $30 billion in state funding from the government at the time and had acquired at least two existing plants, with plans to construct at least three others. The United States Department of Commerce had put Huawei on its entity list in 2019, eventually "prohibiting it from working with American companies in almost all circumstances." However, if Huawei were to function under the names of other companies without disclosing its own involvement, it might have been able to circumvent those restrictions to "indirectly purchase American chipmaking equipment and other supplies that would otherwise be prohibited."
On 6 September 2023, Huawei launched its new Mate 60 smartphone. The phone is powered by a new Kirin 9000s chip, made in China by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC). This processor was the first to use the new 7 nanometre SMIC technology. TechInsights had stated in 2022 that it believed SMIC had managed to produce 7 nm chips, even though faced by a harsh sanctions regime, by adapting simpler machines that it could still purchase from ASML. Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said that this showed that the US sanctions might have had the effect of sending China's chip-making industry into overdrive: "If SMIC really has perfected its 7nm process, this would be a major advance that can help Huawei remain at the forefront of the smartphone industry." TechInsights found evidence that the processor had been manufactured using SMIC's N+2 7 nm node. One of its analysts, Dan Hutcheson, who had led the breakdown of the new device, stated that it demonstrates "impressive technical progress China's semiconductor industry has made" despite not having EUVL tools, and that "the difficulty of this achievement also shows the resilience of the country's chip technological ability". However other analysts have said that such an achievement may lead to harsher sanctions against it.
Replacement operating systems
After the US sanctions regime started in summer 2018, Huawei started working on its own in-house operating system codenamed "HongMeng OS": in an interview with Die Welt, executive Richard Yu stated in 2019 that an in-house OS could be used as a "plan B" if it were prevented from using Android or Windows as the result of US action. Huawei filed trademarks for the names "Ark", "Ark OS", and "Harmony" in Europe, which were speculated to be connected to this OS. On 9 August 2019, Huawei officially unveiled Harmony OS at its inaugural HDC developers' conference in Dongguan with the ARK compiler which can be used to port Android APK packages to the OS.
In September 2019, Huawei began offering the Linux distribution Deepin as a pre-loaded operating system on selected Matebook models in China.
Whereas at first the official Huawei line was that Harmony OS was not intended for smartphones, in June 2021 Huawei began shipping its smartphones with Harmony OS by default in China (in Europe it kept Android, in its own version EMUI, as the default). The operating system proved a success in China, rising from no market share at all to 10 per cent of the Chinese market for smartphones within two years (from mid-2021 to mid-2023), at the expense of Android.
Other countries
In 2013, Taiwan blocked mobile network operators and government departments from using Huawei equipment.
In 2018, Japan banned Huawei from receiving government contracts.
In 2019, Vietnam left Huawei out of bids to build the country's 5G network out of national security concerns. However, in 2025, Huawei won several contracts to supply Vietnam with 5G equipment.
Following the initial 2020–2021 China–India skirmishes, India announced that Huawei telecommunication gear would be removed from the country and that the company would be blocked from participating in India's 5G network out of national security concerns.
Ten out of the 27 European Union member states have regulatory frameworks curbing Huawei products. They range from bans, higher barriers to approval, refusal to renew licenses, and unimplemented proposals. In 2025, the European Commission was reported to be exploring ways to phase Huawei products out of their member states' telecommunication networks.
Having previously banned Huawei from participating in its 5G auction, Brazil reversed its position in early 2021 and allowed Huawei to participate.
In May 2022, Canada's government banned Huawei and ZTE equipment from the country's 5G network, with network operators having until 28 June 2024 to remove what they had already installed. The ban followed years of lobbying from the US, part of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that also includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK. Australia and New Zealand have also banned or restricted Huawei products.
In October 2022, the UK extended the deadline by a year to the end of 2023 for removing core Huawei equipment from network functions. The ban, originally announced in 2020 following US pressure, calls for the phasing out of all Huawei gear from UK's 5G network by the end of 2027, which remains unchanged.
Per an August 2023 decree on 5G network development, Costa Rica barred firms from all countries that have not signed the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime. The decree affects Chinese firms like Huawei, as well as firms from South Korea, Russia and Brazil, among others.
In a 2024 literature review, academics Richard Heeks et al. write that U.S. warnings about Huawei have been largely ignored by the global south countries.
In July 2024, the German government announced a deal with telecommunication companies in the country to remove Chinese 5G equipment, including from Huawei, by 2029.
In June 2025, Taiwan added Huawei to its export control list.
In May 2026, the European Commission recommended that all EU member states exclude Huawei and ZTE equipment from their telecom infrastructure.
Chinese view
Western distrust and targeting of Huawei is generally viewed by the Chinese public as unjustified. This has led to a perspective in the Chinese public and among city governments that patronizing Huawei helps support China in geopolitical and technological competition with the United States. Huawei has thus received high levels of support in terms of public sentiment which its rival firms do not benefit from to the same extent. Huawei's top position in China's smart cities technology market has in particular been boosted by these sentiments.
