A Huawei Honor 5X, on display at the Mobile World Congress 2016. Credit: Kārlis Dambrāns, Creative Commons
Last November, Huawei announced that it had sold its budget smartphone brand called Honor to a consortium of state-backed investors. The deal, which Reuters said brought Huawei $15 billion, came just after the U.S. government tightened sanctions against the Chinese telecom giant. Faced with the threat of losing access to American chips, Huawei sold Honor (not its main smartphone brand) to the Chinese government. This week, as part of an occasional feature, The Wire breaks down the Huawei transaction and the broader implications of the deal, with Scott Livingston, a former analyst at the Office of the United States Trade Representative and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Washington think tank. Livingston spoke with me after the release of his CSIS report, “Huawei, Honor and China's Evolving State Capitalist Toolkit.”
About two months ago, Huawei said it was going to divest of a popular smartphone brand called Honor. Why did it do that?
The decision to s
Exclusive longform investigative journalism, Q&As, news and analysis, and data on Chinese business elites and corporations. We publish China scoops you won't find anywhere else.
A weekly curated reading list on China from David Barboza, Pulitzer Prize-winning former Shanghai correspondent for The New York Times.
A daily roundup of China finance, business and economics headlines.
We offer discounts for groups, institutions and students. Go to our Subscriptions page for details.
Increasingly, Democrats and Republicans believe that climate change and China pose a single interconnected challenge. As a result — and for the first time ever — a window is opening for bipartisan cooperation on climate policy. Historically progressive ideas like a 'carbon border adjustment mechanism' now have conservative champions, for instance. But with Washington's main focus on the Warming War with China, can it still save the planet?
A look at China’s electricity grid: how it works, who foots the bill, and how its structure leads to power crunches and expensive prices despite the relative abundance of energy in China.
The academic talks about the changing understanding of Leninist regimes; common misperceptions of the post-Mao era; and what the collapse of the Soviet Union means for China today.
