I remember talks here on HN about Chinese made IOT devices phoning home to servers in China. There have also been discussion on HN about Huawei's telecom equipment being backdoored or simply rigged to siphon information back to china.
Random Chinese made IOT devices phoning home to servers in China is definitely a thing, but has nothing to do with Huawei.
[1] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/evidence-of-backdoors-i...
Devices that need to legitimately phone home for something tend to do so by requesting servers within or close to the country they were developed in.
Imagine people getting riled up at the thought of Apple phoning home to a US-based NTP server..