The untold story of the mysterious family dynasty at the center of China’s Huawei.

On December 1, 2018, Meng Wanzhou, daughter of Ren Zhengfei, founder and CEO of China’s most powerful company, Huawei Technologies, was detained at the request of U.S. authorities as she prepared to board a flight out of Vancouver, Canada. The detention of Huawei’s female scion set the U.S.-China trade skirmish on fire— and, for the first time, revealed the Ren family’s prominence in Beijing’s power structure. 

In The Listening State, acclaimed Washington Post reporter Eva Dou exposes the untold story of the rise of Ren Zhengfei and the mysterious family dynasty at the center of Huawei, whose connections to state apparatus reveal a deeper truth about China’s surveillance web and its global ambitions. Through its technologies, Huawei has helped solidify and enforce China’s growing police state, in which outspoken entrepreneurs like Jack Ma have been silenced, tycoons have disappeared, and executives must put patriotism above profit.  

Based on over a decade of on-the-ground reporting and an astonishing trove of confidential documents never published in English, The Listening State paints an epic story of familial and political intrigue that shines a clarifying light on how business and government work together in an authoritarian state, and how companies fit into China’s international ambitions under Xi Jinping.  

The story of Ren Zhengfei and Huawei exposes the human face of China’s modern security state and gets to the heart of the central questions of the U.S.-China trade war: How did these turbocharged Chinese companies emerge? Who really controls them? And what does China’s growing surveillance web mean for the Chinese people — and for the rest of the world?