Huawei chief Eric Xu has hit back at US Congress members trying to block the Chinese company's research partnerships with US universities. In an interview with Light Reading in Shanghai, Xu, the current rotating chairman of Huawei, said senator Marco Rubio and fellow Republican representative Jim Banks were "closed-minded and ill-informed" about the Huawei research projects.
Rubio, Banks and two dozen other members of Congress have written to US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos calling for an inquiry into Huawei's campus partnerships, which give China access to advanced technologies, they claim.
"It seems to me their bodies are in the information age but their minds are still in the agrarian age," Xu said. "Their behavior shows not just their ignorance of science and innovation but also their own lack of confidence."Xu said that Huawei's joint research projects are focused on basic science, and not on commercial products ready for deployment. "It often takes decades or even hundreds of years of effort in research and development to translate science and theories into something that's available in the market," he said. Furthermore, Huawei has not enjoyed exclusive access to the research results.
