Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei Technologies is planning to work closely with domestic universities to boost basic research and draw in fresh talent, founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei said during a visit to Sichuan University. Ren visited the university on June 5 in southwestern China, where he said that US-sanctioned Huawei is working closely with universities worldwide on basic theoretical research to “overcome its shortcomings”, according to a Sichuan University blog post last week. Huawei hopes to deepen its cooperation with the public university, one of the oldest in China, as it “highly values” the role that talent plays in technological innovation, the 79-year-old entrepreneur said, according to the post. He added that the main goal is to contribute to technological breakthroughs in key fields and on critical issues facing the industry.
Huawei’s quest for talent has long been a top priority for Ren, whose company has been grappling with escalating export restrictions since Washington blacklisted the Shenzhen-based tech giant in 2019. In a speech last July, the founder said that Huawei will “save talent, not US dollars”. In the months following its blacklisting, Ren initiated a recruitment programme called “Top Minds” – later dubbed “Genius Youth” – which gave priority to job applicants who were winners of top research honours or produced research with “tangible and impactful results”, according to an advertisement Huawei posted on the microblogging site Weibo at the time. Ren has been on other university tours, as well, visiting four in three days in July 2020, including Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Two months later he visited China’s top two universities in Beijing – Tsinghua University and Peking University – along with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
China needs “pure research that is not driven by” applied science, Ren said in Beijing that September, according to a transcript the company published on its employee forum.
