Not necessarily about China specifically, but why is corporate ownership so hard in general to deduce? Is it the case that public, queryable records simply do not exist, or they do exist but they require, say, manual steps to process through?
The question of who owns a company is often open to interpretation. For example, which of the following is correct?
* Mark Zuckerberg owns ~25% of Facebook, because he owns ~25% of the outstanding shares.
* Mark Zuckerberg owns ~50% of Facebook, because he has a lot of special shares that end up giving him ~50% of the shareholder votes.
* Mark Zuckerberg owns Facebook in totality, because he runs the company and there’s no mechanism for anyone to force him out.
In this particular case, the authors and Huawei seem to agree about what’s on paper. The authors just don’t think that the structure Huawei calls “worker ownership” allows workers to actually decide what the company will do.
Zuck could be successfully sued if he acted in a way that obviously enriched himself at the expense of other shareholders. The court does not recognise that he owns the entire company, therefor he does not.
And that's probably the right way to look at it in most contexts. But if there were a controversy about whether Zuckerberg is using Facebook to spy on people, it would be a really silly deflection for him to say "I think you'll find that's impossible because Facebook is owned by the American people".
