Inside Huawei's secret HQ, China is shaping the future regardless of events in Canada

The surprise arrest of Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, has thrust the company into a political firestorm and deepened a core threat: that more and more countries will blacklist its switches, routers and phones out of growing concern that they could be hijacked by foreign spies.

Yet inside Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen, China, a secretive group of engineers toil away heedless to such risks. They are working on what’s next – a raft of artificial intelligence, cloud-computing and chip technology crucial to China’s national priorities and Huawei’s future. As the trade war drags on, China’s government has pushed to create an industry that is less dependent on cutting-edge US semiconductors and software.

Meng’s detention, far from slowing these ambitions, will instead speed the fall of this “silicon curtain,” when the US and China will no longer provide chips to one another, Gus Richard, a Northland Capital Markets analyst, wrote in a recent report. “Huawei is the icon of the rise of China industrial power,” he wrote.

Though Meng was granted bail by a Canadian court, she must remain in the Vancouver area as she awaits possible extradition to the US on fraud charges.

The company is investing massive resources in next-generation technology, seeking to replicate the success it has had in other areas. Over the past decade, the closely held firm has quietly emerged as a titan in networking and telecoms gear, now second only to San Jose, California-based Cisco Systems.