Ren Zhengfei is the founder of Huawei, a company which has come under intense fire from the US in recent months amid fears it is a backdoor for Chinese surveillance and is involved in corporate skullduggery.
In December 2018, the company's CFO and Ren's daughter, Meng Wanzhou, was arrested in Canada at the request of the US. Since then the US has accused Meng of breaking sanctions, and the company as a whole of stealing trade secrets . Huawei and Meng deny any wrongdoing.
The US has long frozen Huawei out of its own phone market, citing concerns that the company could act as a backdoor for the Chinese government to spy on US citizens. More recently, the US has been lobbying its allies to forego using any of Huawei's equipment in setting up 5G networks.
Ren downplayed the power the US had to torpedo Huawei's business. "There's no way the US can crush us," he told the BBC on Monday. "The world cannot leave us because we are more advanced. Even if they persuade more countries not to use us temporarily, we can always scale things down a bit. "
He even spun the US's sustained pressure as a positive. "Because the US keeps targeting us and finding fault with us it has forced us to improve our products and services," he said.
Ren made special mention of the UK in his interview. "We still trust in the UK, and we hope that the UK will trust us even more. We will invest even more in the UK. Because if the US doesn't trust us, then we will shift our investment from the US to the UK on an even bigger scale," he said.
The arrest of Meng Wanzhou
In the interview, Ren also spoke about the arrest of his daughter Meng Wanzhou. "I object to what the US has done. This kind of politically motivated act is not acceptable."
"There's no impact on Huawei's business due to Meng Wanzhou's loss of freedom. In fact, we're growing even faster. So they caught Meng Wanzhou, maybe they got the wrong person," he said.
"They may have thought if they've arrested her, Huawei would fall. But we didn't fall, we are still moving forward."
SEE ALSO: We got a tour of Huawei's sprawling Shenzhen campus, home to the Chinese tech giant at the eye of a global security storm
