Ren Zhengfei

Ren was born on 25 October 1944, in Zhenning County, Guizhou. His grandfather, Ren Sanhe (任三和), was a master chef from Rendian Village (任店村), Pujiang County, Zhejiang, and who specialized in curing ham. His father, Ren Musheng (任木生), with the courtesy name Moxun (摩逊; Móxùn), failed to complete university studies when Ren Zhengfei's grandfather died a year prior to his graduation.

During the Japanese occupation, his father migrated south to Guangzhou to work in a military factory of the Nationalist government as an accounts clerk. After 1949, his father was appointed as the president of No. 1 Middle School of Duyun (都匀一中), where he met Ren Zhengfei's mother Cheng Yuanzhao (程远昭), a senior teacher at the school; his elder brother became a member of the CCP in 1958. Ren has five younger sisters and one younger brother.

Education

He spent his primary and junior high school years in a mountain village.

In elementary and middle school, Ren was known for being withdrawn and unsociable, and he was denied admission to the Communist Youth League due to his insufficiently developed spirit of collectivism. In high school, he always wore a single-layer coat due to poverty.

In 1960, in his third year of high school, there was a serious famine in Guizhou Province. At this time, Ren's family was starving. In order to support his family, Ren implemented a strict system of food distribution in his family. To cope with hunger, Ren often went to the mountains to pick wild fruits instead of grain. No matter how hungry he was, he did not eat the rations of his family. Thanks to this, none of his brothers and sisters starved to death. To relieve his hunger, Ren mixed rice bran and vegetables together, which he stopped when his father found out. With the Chinese college examinations approaching, Cheng Yuanzhao (程远昭), even though poor, gave him a scallion pancake every morning. Ren later thought the pancake was crucial to his future achievements.

In 1963, 19-year-old Ren was admitted to Chongqing Institute of Architectural Engineering (later merged into Chongqing University) to major in building services engineering. Cheng Yuanzhao made him two white shirts and a pair of sheets, which he wore throughout four years of college.

In 1966, when Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, Ren, who was studying in college, received a letter mentioning that his father had been dismissed and criticized for his experience working in the Kuomintang's 412 military factory. Ren boarded a train surrounded by Red Guards who were asking the passengers about their background. Because he replied that his father was a teacher, Ren was pushed off the train by them, so he had to walk home. Ren told his family that there were also "infights" in college, and basically no one attended classes, but his father told him that knowledge was important and encouraged him to use it to help his brothers and sisters.

After returning to college, Ren taught himself computers, digital technology, automatic control, logic, philosophy, and three foreign languages. Ren collected leaflets and sent them to his mother to encourage his father who was in trouble. In one piece of paper, there is a passage from Zhou Enlai: "cadres should seek truth from facts. If they are not, do not admit it at random. Things will always be figured out." Cheng Yuanzhao passed this passage on to his father. Because of this note, his father did not commit suicide. In 1970, he obeyed a policy directed at all college students in leaving school to join the army for training.

In 1968, Ren Zhengfei graduated from university and was assigned to the 304th Battalion of the 31st Detachment of the Infrastructure Engineering Corps in Anshun, which was founded in 1966, to participate in the construction of the aircraft factory of the 011 base.

In 1974, in order to build for industrial modernization, he established Liaoyang Petrochemical Fiber General Factory in Liaoyang.

In the same year, Ren was drafted into the army and joined the 22nd detachment of the Infrastructure Engineering Corps of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). He served as a technician and engineer, working on automation processes in the chemical industry. While serving in the PLA, Ren extensively studied Mao Zedong's writings, particularly Quotations of Chairman Mao and Selected Works of Mao Zedong. He received several awards for his proficiency and excellence in Maoist theory.

In March 1978, 33-year-old Ren went to Beijing to attend the National Science Conference, which was attended by more than 6000 delegates. The same year, Ren joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Throughout most of his military career, Ren was denied entry to the Communist Party due to his parents' social background and his father's work for the Nationalist government. He was only able to join the Party shortly before his retirement.

In 1982, the government of the People's Republic of China readjusted its economic and military system and reduced the size of the army. Ren was transferred to a scientific research base. At this time, Ren's wife went to work in the Shenzhen Southern Oil Group (深圳市南油 (集团)有限公司). Subsequently, he made a job transfer, ending 11 years of army life, and went south to Shenzhen with his sons and daughters. The same year, he attended the 12th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. After joining the Southern Oil Group, Ren could not stand the bureaucracy of some department leaders who were content with the status quo and did not want to make progress. He requested that one of the company's subsidiaries be handed over to him, but the request was not approved.

In 1983, he was appointed deputy general manager of an electronics company owned by the group. Soon after, Ren was cheated out of more than 2 million yuan by a businessman. At that time, his monthly salary in the mainland was less than 100 yuan. Ren's first job ended in resignation. After resigning, Ren divorced his wife, and he rented a house of no more than ten square meters with his parents and nephews.

Ren's younger brother, Ren Shulu (任樹錄 in Chinese and Steven Ren in English, born in 1956), is a graduate of Yunnan University and has been an employee of Huawei since 1992. He currently serves as a member of the Supervisory Board and head of the company's logistics support division.

Ren's first wife was Meng Jun (孟军), the daughter of Meng Dongbo (孟东波), a former deputy governor of Sichuan Province. They had two children: daughter Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟) and son Ren Ping (任平), both of whom initially took up their mother's surname Meng (孟). Meng Wanzhou (Sabrina Meng in English, born in 1972), earned a master's degree from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 1998. She has worked at Huawei since 1993 and is currently the company's chief financial officer (CFO).

After their divorce, Ren married Yao Ling (姚凌), with whom he had another daughter, Annabel Yao, who is 25 years younger than Meng Wanzhou. As of December 2018, Annabel is a ballet dancer and a computer science student at Harvard University and made a high-profile debut at Le Bal des Débutantes in Paris in 2018.

Despite being Huawei's CEO, Ren is a user of Apple products and has stated that the "iPhone has a good ecosystem and when my family are abroad, I still buy them iPhones, so one can't narrowly think love for Huawei should mean loving Huawei phones."

Ren Zhengfei has a passion for reading books on politics, economics, humanities, literature, and art. He prefers historical literature the most and is least interested in fiction and management theory. He explains this choice as followsFiction tells imaginary stories — and they are too far removed from reality. As for management books, they are written by professors sitting behind closed doors in their offices — which stifles their creativity. It is impossible to reduce dynamic corporate management to a fixed set of dogmas.

Ren is a fan of the TV series The Qin Empire, which tells the story of the reforms of Chinese statesman Shang Yang. He purchased thousands of copies of the series for Huawei employees.

Of all Chinese political leaders, Ren Zhengfei holds Deng Xiaoping in the highest regard, repeatedly calling him the greatest reformer in China's history. Among foreign politicians, Ren has the greatest respect for Yitzhak Rabin, and he even refers to himself as a student of the former Israeli prime minister.