Illustration: Liu Rui/GT
Chinese tech giant Huawei recently introduced Flex:ai, an open-source software tool designed to optimize the use of AI chips, with reports saying it can “create an analogue AI chips 1,000 times faster than Nvidia’s.”
This software emerges amid ongoing high-end GPU export restrictions, reflecting China’s efforts in alleviating chip shortages by improving software-driven efficiency. This systematic approach encompasses a full-stack ecosystem, ranging from chip architecture and operating systems to communications, cloud, enterprise, smart cars and core algorithms, where each link strengthens the whole.
Huawei is not a solitary, towering tree, but a natural product of the fertile soil that nurtures it. This soil is the result of China’s 40-plus years of reform and opening-up – a market economy painstakingly cultivated amid a large population and complex social structure, and a unique environment shaped by the socialist market economy. This was already subtly evident in 2019 when I accompanied media representatives from the US and Germany to interview Huawei.
Against the backdrop of US bans citing “security,” foreign reporters grilled Huawei over its ties to the Chinese government, seeking political explanations. Rather than defending the firm, Chairman Liang Hua advised them to first examine Huawei’s 30-year history.
Liang’s answer subtly shifts the questioner’s focus from a single “national security” framework to a broader temporal and social dimension.
Huawei was neither “designated” out of thin air from some government document, nor a mere product of policy, but a company gradually “forged” and “tempered” in the turbulent currents of China’s marketization drive – rooted in a city like Shenzhen.
Liang’s remarks, “Read Huawei’s entrepreneurial history,” are equivalent to reminding foreign reporters that the real question is not just who Huawei is, but what kind of China has nurtured Huawei.
If you extend the timeline, you will find that many of Huawei’s advantages – long-term investment in research and development, stubborn adherence to technical routes and sensitivity and tenacity regarding “survival” – are actually forged in the overall Chinese environment, becoming the driving force of China’s technology and manufacturing development.
In essence, the cause behind Huawei’s success can be found in both the most common side of the Chinese story – the release of market economic forces – and the unique side of the Chinese system – a certain tension and tacit understanding formed between national goals and corporate development.
In the years after 2019, facts have gradually proven that many decision-makers and commentators in the West have never truly grasped this fundamental point.
They frame Huawei’s supposed “danger” as stemming from its alleged backers, citing purported state support and unfair practices. This narrative ignores Huawei’s market-driven core strengths gained through global competition.
But if you erase this part of its ability, you will come to a seemingly obvious but very dangerous conclusion: Cut off its supplies, ban cooperation and rally allies to block it; it will collapse like resource-dependent firms.
This inference is clearly wrong.
If some Westerners persist in reducing tech competition to supply chain disruptions, industrial security to sanctions, and seeking to contain a major industrial nation by “strangling,” they will lose control in following ways, not gain security.
First, they will lose the predictability and negotiability of China’s technological development.
Second, if they are decision makers, their countries will lose long-term dominance over the global technology order.
Third, it risks illusion: Believing blockades can replace understanding.
If they continue down this wrong path, the inevitable outcome is that they will lose the most valuable thing for the overall future situation – the ability to understand the other, and the possibility of jointly shaping a new order with a growing major country.
The author is a senior editor with the People’s Daily and currently a senior fellow with the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China. dinggang@globaltimes.com.cn. Follow him on X @dinggangchina
