Maybe it was an ex-Cisco employee? They helped China in the first place and the Huawei hardware is almost the same.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/ciscos-latest-attempt-...
I don't know if the Chinese firewall has been upgraded to Chinese hardware or if it is still running on US hardware. This kind of hardware often last for 10+ years so I would not be surprised if the hardware is still mostly from Cisco.