Inside a glass case in a private room in Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen, China, are 10 blue books that help answer a question that has vexed the US government: who really owns the huge Chinese telecoms equipment company?
The centimetre-thick volumes contain the names, ID numbers and other details on the roughly 80,000 employees that Huawei says own almost 99 per cent of the company under an “employee stock option plan”.
During a tour of the Shenzhen campus, Jiang Xisheng, chief secretary of the board, allowed the Financial Times to examine the books to see the holdings of the staff who own Huawei, through what is called the “union”, along with founder Ren Zhengfei.