He was a 43-year-old man with nothing left to lose. He had been cheated out of 2 million yuan. Fired from his job. His marriage was falling apart. He borrowed 21,000 yuan from friends and started a company in a run-down Shenzhen apartment.
That company is now the most powerful telecommunications empire on Earth.
Meet Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei.
> Born October 25, 1944. Zhenning County, Guizhou Province.
> Poor mountain village. Parents were rural school teachers.
> Eldest of seven children.
> Family so poor his mother rationed every meal.
> Father was a university-educated intellectual.
> Persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.
> Told young Ren one thing. Knowledge is power. Study. Do not follow the crowd.
> Studied at Chongqing University of Architecture and Engineering.
> Taught himself computer technology. Automatic control. Advanced mathematics. Foreign languages.
> 1974. Joined the military as a construction engineer.
> Worked on the Liao Yang chemical fiber plant.
> Rose to technical deputy regimental commander.
> 1978. Attended the National Science Conference in Beijing.
> 1982. Elected delegate to the 12th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.
> 1983. The army downsized. Demobilized.
> Moved to Shenzhen to join his wife.
> Assigned to a subsidiary as a deputy manager.
> No business experience. He was a soldier and an engineer.
> Then he was cheated.
> A fraudulent trading company disappeared with 2 million yuan.
> Astronomical sum at the time.
> He spent a year chasing the money. Recovered most of it.
> The company fired him anyway.
> His wife divorced him.
> 43 years old. Jobless. Living with his parents and siblings in a cramped apartment.
> The family could only afford dead fish and shrimp from the market.
> 1987. Borrowed 21,000 yuan. Founded Huawei.
> The name meant China has promise.
> Three employees. Started as a reseller importing switches from Hong Kong.
> He did not want to be a middleman. He wanted to build his own technology.
> 1989. Began developing Huawei's own switch.
> 1990. First Huawei-manufactured switch passed certification.
> Foreign giants fought over China's major cities.
> Ren took Huawei to the countryside. Targeted markets the international companies ignored.
> That strategy worked.
> 1997. Visited the United States. Toured Bell Labs and IBM.
> Saw what a real modern enterprise looked like.
> Came back and spent hundreds of millions hiring IBM consultants.
> Gave his managers a brutal order. For five years do exactly what the consultants say. No changes. After five years you can adapt. After ten years you can restructure.
> Management philosophy. The customer comes first. The boss comes last.
> Face the customer. Turn your back on your superiors.
> Built a system where Huawei does not depend on any single person. Not even him.
> He owns less than 1% of Huawei.
> The rest is held by employees through a virtual share system.
> He called it everyone's shareholding.
> His lack of selfishness was one reason Huawei succeeded.
> Known for his blunt style.
> Told employees the biggest problem would be having too much money and not knowing how to spend it.
> Buy a house, he said, but make the balcony big. So you can air out your money before it gets moldy.
> 2009. Huawei entered the Fortune Global 500.
> 2018. Revenue reached $107 billion. Customers in 170 countries.
> Then the world turned against it.
> 2018. His daughter Meng Wanzhou arrested in Canada at the request of the United States.
> Held under house arrest for nearly three years.
> 2019. US placed Huawei on the Entity List. Cut off access to American chips and software.
> Ren did not retreat. He accelerated.
> Huawei developed its own chips. Its own operating system. Its own ecosystem.
> The company survived.
> 2025. Age 81. Sat down with top competitive programming students in Shanghai.
> Spoke for 14,000 words about AI, education, and the future.
> Said China and the US were pursuing different paths.
> America chasing the highest peaks. China solving practical problems.
> If you can reach high, do not reach low.
> He still goes to work. Still does not give many interviews.
> Still travels without an entourage.
A teacher's son from a mountain village in Guizhou. Cheated out of his savings. Fired from his job. Divorced. Broke at 43. Borrowed 21,000 yuan and built the company that now connects a third of humanity.
He did not start with money. He did not start with connections. He started with knowledge, discipline, and a refusal to quit.
His name is Ren Zhengfei. He is 81 years old. He is still building.