"That doesn't mean the party is there making every decision, it isn't. "The Communist Party is not only the government, it is the judiciary, it is journalists, it is the police," Thorley says.
Thorley, who lived in China for seven years and started a business there, says all of the country's institutions and businesses are essentially reliant on the ruling Communist Party.
"Huawei is not really an exception," says Martin Thorley, a researcher at The University of Nottingham's China Policy Institute. It all comes down to alleged ties to the Chinese government. Poland – where a Huawei employee was arrested on spying charges (he has since been fired) – has called for EU and Nato leaders to make a joint decision on whether Huawei's infrastructure equipment should be banned. To complicate things, Meng is also the daughter of Huawei founder and president Ren Zhengfei. She faces a court date in February when it will be decided if she should be extradited to the US to face chargers. Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, was arrested in Canada in December 2018 and is accused of selling telecoms equipment to Iran in contravention of US sanctions. “Canada’s government should ignore the threats and ban Huawei from Canada’s 5G networks to protect the security of Canadians,” Richard Fadden, former national security advisor to the prime minister of Canada, wrote in The Globe and Mail.