Huawei, the world's largest telecom equipment and communications electronics vendor, has long said that it is 99% owned by most of its 174,000 employees. Critics of Huawei have argued it is really controlled by the Chinese government, and have used that argument in trade battles with the company. A new paper by Donald Clarke of George Washington University and Christopher Balding of Fulbright University Vietnam (Who Owns Huawei?) concludes that while employees own 99% of the company's equity value through a kind of synthetic equity plan broadly available to company's employees and operated by the company's union, the employees have no control rights over the company. The remaining 1% is owned by the founder. Clarke and Balding say that because the union is effectively controlled by the state, the state really runs the company. Huawei disagrees with this characterization. Ownership without control, of course, is common in employee ownership plans, so assessing this issue depends on what people mean by ownership. There is agreement that Huawei's employee compensation is significantly affected by company performance.