Huawei Launches New Surveillance ‘Corps’ in Creepy Military-Style Rally

D uring a bizarre, military-style ceremony that highlighted Huawei’s ties to China’s security state, the tech company launched a new internal business unit focused on developing artificial-intelligence-powered surveillance technology. The new unit will be focused on streamlining the embattled Chinese company’s efforts to become a worldwide leader in cutting-edge AI surveillance technology that can be deployed by cities around the world.

The ceremony puts the lie to Huawei’s global public-relations and lobbying campaigns that strive to dispel the well-founded notion that its ultimate loyalties are with the Chinese Communist Party.

Over the past few years, the telecom giant has been clobbered by Trump-era sanctions and a campaign to persuade foreign governments to stop using Huawei products in their communications networks. The Trump administration warned the governments of U.S. allies and other countries that Huawei is part of the CCP’s espionage apparatus. Those claims have been vindicated by subsequent reporting that links Huawei to the party’s espionage networks.

Last year, amid the international restrictions, Huawei’s revenue continued to decline, though its profitability grew as it pivoted to other sectors. Part of the effort to transform Huawei in response to Western bans is a reorganization of the company into various “corps,” each focused on a different emerging industry.

During the aforementioned ceremony on May 26, Huawei inaugurated its corps for “machine vision,” an AI-based computer analysis of images. This corps is key to the company’s efforts to enter the surveillance-technology market. What stood out from the event was the pugilistic way in which the company presented its work.

According to a Chinese security-media report, which the video-surveillance trade group IPVM shared with National Review, the ceremony featured a row of uniformed Huawei employees doing a raised-fist CCP salute onstage. Behind them was a banner that read:

Application integration, Cloud coordination, Build a leading competitor! Deepen channel distribution to help customers succeed on the frontline. Stay focused and competitive to live and die with the Corps. Machine Vision Corps, Victory! Huawei, Victory! Victory! Victory!

The new Huawei corps recruits shouted the slogan as well. In addition to Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei, his daughter and Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou was present. Meng had been in custody in Canada but was released last year, after the U.S. dropped an extradition request in an apparent deal with Beijing.

For years, Huawei has worked to present itself as a normal, privately held technology company, conducting a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign in the U.S., forming partnerships with mainstream-media outlets, and even winning endorsements from former top U.S. government officials.

But the machine-vision ceremony is only the latest example disproving that. In addition to Huawei’s internal party committee — a body that promotes CCP orthodoxy within nominally private firms — the party’s influence can be seen in Ren’s efforts to shape his company to reflect party culture and organizational structures. As IPVM noted in its report on the event, Ren’s exhortation to Huawei employees to “firmly remember your mission” is a reference to an old party slogan.

Huawei aims to enter the market for machine vision to compete with other Chinese surveillance giants, such as Hikvision and Dahua, both of which are subject to U.S. sanctions for their role in the mass surveillance of Uyghurs.

That effort may have global implications, enabling the export of mass-surveillance technology sold by a company with a clear allegiance to the party. The head of Huawei’s machine-vision department in 2020, Duan Aiguo, pledged at the time that Huawei would be the top company in that industry within five years. While the Chinese security-media report said it wasn’t clear that Duan would officially lead this new corps, he was seen at the ceremony sitting with the core of the corporate leadership.

Duan would be a noteworthy choice for the role, considering his work on Huawei’s “smart city” initiative. The company says it has rolled out some 160 of these safe-city and smart-city systems, encompassing facial-recognition and license-plate-scan technology, around the world. A Privacy International report published last November calls for more scrutiny of these programs, which are in place in Uganda, Myanmar, and other developing countries, in addition to developed Western countries such as Spain.

Another project, between Huawei and an enterprise affiliated with Russia’s Sberbank, also provides more context about Huawei’s international ambitions in the surveillance space. The two firms jointly developed a platform that combined each of their existing technological capabilities.

An October 2020 press release about the project stated: “The VisionLabs–Huawei solution can find faces in videos and on photos, extract biometric templates they identify on faces, and match them against the available database. The solution can use road and IP cameras, dashboard cameras, wearable devices, etc. as image sources.”

Presumably, the reinvigorated machine-vision unit at Huawei would continue to hone that sort of technology, including for applications that could be exported abroad for foreign countries’ smart cities.

Huawei already has extensive experience with tailoring surveillance-focused products toward the Chinese authorities’ needs. An extensive Washington Post exposé last year detailed Huawei’s work with party officials, providing voice-monitoring software, technical management programs for reeducation and forced-labor camps in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Shanxi, and facial-recognition software for use in cities across Xinjiang.

A Huawei spokesman did not respond to NR’s request for comment.