'Companies are seldom treated like this': how Huawei fought back

A pillar box red electric train connects Paris, Verona and Grenada via Budapest's Liberty Bridge and on to Heidelberg Castle in a 120-hectare fantasy business park dreamt up by the Chinese billionaire Ren Zhengfei. Ren, 74, a former Red Army engineer who founded the telecommunications company Huawei in 1987 and still owns a 1.14% stake, asked the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma to recreate some of Europe's most historic cities. He hoped to inspire an army of 25,000 research and development staff to challenge Apple, Google and Samsung. While its US competitors keep their research facilities on lockdown to prevent corporate espionage (oft allegedly by the Chinese), Huawei is inviting the world's media into its labs and factories in an attempt to dispel the US government's claims that the privately held company is an arm of the Chinese state and that its technology could be used to hack into western governments. US politicians allege that Huawei's forthcoming 5G mobile phone networks could be hacked by Chinese spies to eavesdrop on sensitive phone calls, gain access to counter-terrorist operations – and potentially even kill targets by crashing driverless cars.