https://supchina.com/2020/02/12/the-age-of-cooptation-the-high-cost-of-doing-business-in-xis-china/

Huawei realized it would be a serious setback for the company if it didn’t have something similar to Apple’s FaceID, and Huawei went to the government for help. Initially, Huawei hoped the government would put some heat on Apple and force the suppliers to loosen up a little bit. Surprisingly, the government said the following (I am paraphrasing here, based on my conversation with Madame Chen):
Government: Forget about Apple suppliers on this issue.
Huawei: We can’t ignore this. It will be a serious competitive advantage for Apple iPhones if we don’t have something comparable.
Government: We did not say forget about FaceID, just forget about following Apple on hardware. What if we gave you access to a database of 1.4 billion faces and you used that database to develop an AI algorithm to recognize faces? Could you develop an AI solution rather than a hardware solution?
Pretty remarkable allegations.