Huawei makes it worse

Canada! Seriously, who sues Canada? Meng Wanzhou, that’s who. The CFO of Huawei and the daughter of its founder feels wronged by Canadian authorities over her arrest and detention. “False imprisonment” is among the accusations made in a civil case filed March 1.

Huawei has gone on the offensive in recent months to try to prove it’s a good international citizen and can be trusted to supply networking equipment that won’t become a conduit for Chinese espionage. Founder (and Wanzhou’s father) Ren Zhengfei himself started fronting the media because, by the company’s own admission, it’s in the middle of a public-relations crisis.

In addition to attempting to recruit current and former journalists to its PR team, Huawei has started inviting journalists to its Shenzhen campus, as if a guided tour would prove anything. The result was a slew of articles in which the company made its case against charges of spying.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week, rotating Chairman Guo Ping even invoked Edward Snowden’s name to take jabs at U.S. espionage programs. “Prism, prism on the wall, who is the most trustworthy of them all?” Ping said onstage at the trade show, referencing the U.S. government’s own surveillance project. He told the audience to ask Edward Snowden, the former government worker who blew the whistle on Prism and is now a fugitive from U.S. justice, if they didn’t understand what he meant.

This new campaign appears to be having some success. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern last month left the door open for Huawei to sell its equipment for next-generation mobile networks, while the U.K. cybersecurity watchdog thinks it can manage any risks associated with deploying the company’s products in 5G systems.

But it’s also come off as ham-fisted. Huawei has reportedly been offering overseas journalists all-expense paid trips to its headquarters in Shenzhen, China, spurring a backlash on social media. To clarify, such all-expenses-paid offers are quite common in the tech indus- try, but most outlets refuse to accept on ethical grounds.

Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin shared on Twitter a letter from Huawei public relations, with the company offering to “cover the cost of your flights, hotel, food, etc.” with access to executives who could hold “off-the-record discussions on the various challenges the company is facing in the U.S.”

(Rogin’s response: “Any American journalist who takes Huawei money should be ashamed and shamed.”)

Working in Huawei’s favour has been the lack of clear evidence from the U.S. showing that the company’s equipment is used for spying. In 2017, a jury found the company liable in a civil case for stealing designs for T-mobile’s “Tappy” robot, but that’s not the kind of espionage U.S. authorities have in mind.

The January arrest of a company executive alongside a former Polish security agent on charges of spying for China doesn’t look good for Huawei, but it’s no smoking gun.

Then there’s Ren himself. The 74-year-old’s credibility evaporated when he told foreign media, including CBS and a separate gathering that included Bloomberg News, that his company would refuse to obey Chinese law if it was required to participate in espionage. That’s the founder of a Chinese company with 180,000 employees stating he would break Chinese law rather than infringe the law of any foreign nation.

Which is why the decision to sue Canada is a backward step in its PR campaign. It also reveals Huawei as a cornered tiger that lashes out when its purr fails to sedate the skeptics.

Whether Meng’s case has legal merit isn’t the point. Huawei needs to ask what it gains, even if victorious. The quest for justice is everyone’s right, yet Huawei risks coming off as belligerent instead of the calm and trustworthy partner it’s trying to portray itself as.

And the irony of appealing to Canada’s rule of law when no such option exists back home isn’t lost on the hordes of critics who were already wary of this new charm offensive.

Huawei was doing a pretty good job trying to convince people that it’s not their foe. Suing Canada shows that the company’s biggest enemy is probably itself.