Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei on why he joined China’s Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army
- Ren speaks of his time in the military and how he came to join the Chinese Communist Party
Before Huawei became the telecoms equipment giant that it is today, its founder Ren Zhengfei was part of an army crew sent to China’s frigid northeast. The mission: build a synthetic fibre factory so that every Chinese person had new clothes to wear.
“I joined the military during China’s Cultural Revolution. At that time, there was chaos almost everywhere, including in agriculture and the industry,” Ren, 74, told reporters at Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen this week. “The country was facing very difficult times. These difficulties were reflected in people’s diets and clothing.”
Back then, every Chinese person was allotted one-third of a metre of cloth, which was enough only to patch holes, he said, according to a transcript of his comments provided by Huawei. “So I never wore clothes without patches when I was young.”
Transcript: Read the media Q&A with Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei
This picture of poverty painted by Ren, who grew up in a mountainous town in China’s poorest province, Guizhou, provides a stark contrast to the image of a strong and prosperous China that is being projected today, one of a nation that has landed a lunar probe on the far side of the moon and is competing with the US in advanced technologies from quantum computing to 5G telecommunications.
It also provides a glimpse into Ren’s motivation for joining the engineering corps of the People’s Liberation Army and later, the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
Ren, the son of schoolteachers and a survivor of China’s great famine between 1958 and 1961, said that while he supports the Communist Party, he will “never do anything to harm any other nation.”