Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou returns to hero’s welcome at company headquarters after 21-day quarantine
- Videos circulating on Chinese social media showed Meng, who returned from Canada three weeks ago, waving and embracing cheering colleagues
- The Huawei CFO reached a deal with New York prosecutors for her release last month following a three-year house arrest in Vancouver
Huawei Technologies Co finance chief Meng Wanzhou, who has completed a 21-day Covid-19 quarantine after returning from Canada, came back to her company’s head office to a hero’s welcome on Monday.
Videos of her homecoming to the telecommunications giant’s Shenzhen campus showed a smiling Meng, dressed in black office attire, waving and embracing a roomful of cheering Huawei employees, some holding banners and balloons.
The footage was widely shared on Chinese short video apps and picked up by domestic media outlets, including People’s Daily-affiliated tabloid Global Times and respected financial magazine Caijing. Multiple Huawei employees confirmed to the South China Morning Post that Meng, 49, has resumed work.
Huawei declined to comment further.
The return of Meng, daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, comes as the Chinese tech giant is struggling to overcome the impact of crippling US sanctions, which cut off its access to advanced chips vital to the company’s lucrative handset business, and impeded its sales of telecoms equipment overseas.
Meng, who retained her job title as Huawei’s chief financial officer during her three-year house arrest in Vancouver, landed in Shenzhen on the night of September 25 after reaching a deal with the US Justice Department – a development that has been characterised by Beijing as a victory for China.
Under a deferred prosecution agreement reached in New York, Meng admitted that she had misled global financial institutions over Huawei’s business ties with Iran.
The Chinese government has since released Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, two Canadians detained by Beijing soon after Meng’s arrest in Vancouver in December 2018, although China denied that the two cases are related.
Reactions were mixed on Chinese social media, where the hashtag “Meng Wanzhou is back at work” quickly became the number one trending topic on microblogging platform Weibo on Monday, attracting 240 million views and over 13,000 discussions by late afternoon.
