The Week in Tech: Hostages in the U.S. and China Tech Cold War

He declined to discuss the detained Canadians or Ms. Meng’s arrest.

In a way, Huawei is itself a hostage of larger conflicts. The company has built a globally respected brand. It has won customers by investing in research and development, providing attentive service — and driving its employees really, really hard. (I wrote this week about Huawei’s intense corporate culture.)

Yet to the company’s fiercest critics, Huawei is tarnished simply by being Chinese, and hence within arm’s reach of a government that conducts aggressive espionage against American companies and government agencies. For some people in Washington, it hardly matters that Huawei isn’t state-owned, or that the Chinese government has never asked it to spy on its behalf. The mere possibility is enough.

As part of this week’s visit to Huawei, we reporters were treated to a long presentation on the company’s processes for evaluating products for security risks. It was a barrage of details, earnestly presented, that I suspect would have zero chance of changing the mind of anyone in Washington about Huawei.

Here’s what else caught my eye this week:

■ My colleagues at The Times have produced another blockbuster article full of revelations about how user data is collected and shared by giant tech companies. Here are five takeaways.

■ The Wall Street Journal took a look at Apple’s near-total failure to win over smartphone buyers in a giant, fast-growing market: India. The iPhone is clinging to market share there of around 1 percent, and the company’s revenue in India is half of what executives once hoped for, according to The Journal’s sources. The country simply doesn’t have enough people who are willing to pay Apple prices.

■ Well, it was fun while it lasted. TikTok, the quirky short video app that is now a worldwide hit, has a Nazi problem, according to Motherboard. The app’s Chinese parent company, Bytedance, is no stranger to controversies about gnarly content on its platforms.

■ Finally, I urge you to read this profile of Donald E. Knuth, the legendary computer scientist who, for the past 50 years, has been writing “The Art of Computer Programming” — a multivolume, still-unspooling bible of its field.

Raymond Zhong is a reporter for The New York Times in China. Follow him on Twitter at @zhonggg