They were trapped as soon as they incorporated in China.

Of course, the founding members all had CCP ties, they got massive funding from the government, and their first round of products were all based on trade secrets stolen from Nortel.

But that was decades ago, and people tend to forget that the company was built on top of the CCP stealing Nortel’s secrets and then underbidding them internationally, putting the Canadian company out of business. Nortel had to cover R&D costs, while Huawei just stole the results of Nortel’s R&D and then had CCP subsidies for the production.