“My Daughter Arrest is politically motivated”

February 21, 2019 - United Arab Emirates:  In his first international broadcast interview since his daughter Ms Meng was arrested, Mr. Ren Zhengfei described the arrest of his daughter Meng Wanzhou, the company's chief financial officer, as politically motivated. 

'Firstly, I object to what the US has done. This kind of politically motivated act is not acceptable. 'The US likes to sanction others, whenever there's an issue, they'll use such combative methods. 'We object to this. But now that we've gone down this path, we'll let the courts settle it.'

The US is pursuing criminal charges against Huawei and Ms Meng, including money laundering, bank fraud and stealing trade secrets. Huawei denies any wrongdoing.

Mr. Ren dismissed the pressure from the US. 'There's no way the US can crush us,' he said. '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.'

'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.'

Huawei, which is China's largest private company, has been under scrutiny for its links to the Chinese government - with the US and others expressing concern its technology could be used by China's security services to spy. 

About Chinese government spying, Mr. Ren Said: “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.'