The Zhen-Sun Huang scandal adds to the US-China intelligence war. Experts not mentioned in Trump’s interview with Xi Jinping: It could encourage Beijing to take risks.

President of the United Statestrump Important ally, CEO of NvidiaJen-Hsun Huang Admitted having an extramarital affair with Chinese businessman Huang Le, whom US intelligence officials suspect of spying for Beijing. Although China denies the relevant allegations, a New York Times analysis reported that Trump and Chinese PresidentXi Jinping The scandal highlights the fierce intelligence competition behind diplomatic talks between the United States and China as they prepare to meet next week to hammer out a fragile trade truce.

The HUDA chips fuel the global AI craze and are also the focus of Washington’s control efforts to prevent related technologies from falling into Chinese hands. Analysts reported that Huang Renxun had lobbied Trump to ease restrictions on exports of advanced chips to China, and so he became an important target of Chinese intelligence agencies. Sheena Chestnut Greitens, a China security expert at the University of Texas at Austin, said: “Given Huida’s central position in the US-China technology competition and the importance of the technology competition to the overall US-China confrontation, it is not surprising that someone like him would be one of the top targets of Chinese intelligence collection.”

US intelligence agencies determined that Huang Le was an intelligence asset of the Chinese Ministry of State Security. Former US government intelligence officer Christopher K. Johnson, now chairman of risk consulting firm China Strategies Group, said that although the approach is “bold,” it “shouldn’t be surprising at all.”

Zhang Case said: “Whenever China lists something as a national strategy and priority that requires whole-of-society investment, like chips and AI, it means they will use all available means to achieve their goals, whether through self-development, purchase or theft.”

Huang Renxun visited Beijing at Trump’s invitation in May. When Xi Jinping visited the United States in September, he was also invited to attend a White House state banquet. Until recently, Huang was expected to move to Shenzhen. So far, the scandal has not disrupted Trump and Xi Jinping’s plans to meet in Shenzhen next week. Trump has repeatedly dismissed reports of Chinese spying and cyberattacks on the United States on the grounds that Washington would do the same. He said on the 9th that unlike the Biden administration’s response to the spy balloon incident, he did not plan to mention the matter to Xi Jinping.

Dennis Wilder, a former US intelligence analyst on China and now a senior fellow at Georgetown University, said Trump’s actions could encourage China to take more risks. “The president’s completely lax attitude toward spying has led Beijing to believe that the political backlash caused by spying operations will be very easy to control,” he said.

Weiding also pointed out that Trump has repeatedly downplayed China’s espionage activities on the grounds that every country engages in espionage activities. “The problem is that no other country’s espionage activities can cause as serious harm as China’s, and China is not only capable of doing so, but is actually doing so.”

However, Chinese officials deny allegations of espionage involving the Huang Zhen-hsun scandal, and some in China have questioned what benefits Beijing might have from it. China is encouraging companies to use weaker domestic chips to improve their autonomy, leading some analysts to question the significance of the Huida incident. Shen Dingli, a scholar of international relations in Shanghai, said: “China does not want to import so many Huawei chips. They are trying to force Chinese companies to use Chinese chips produced by Huawei.”

Discussion about Huang on heavily censored Chinese social platforms has focused on his extramarital affairs. Chinese nationalist commentators believe that the scandal adds to anti-China, anti-Trump, and anti-AI forces in the United States. Ren Yi, a Chinese blogger who studied at Harvard University and goes by the nickname “Chairman Rabbit”, wrote: “Anti-China politics has once again combined various different political demands in the United States.”