STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Next, we get a broader picture of Chinese espionage on U.S. tech companies. We are following news that Jensen Huang - the head of Nvidia - admitted to an affair with a Chinese business executive who is suspected of spying for China. Some shareholders have sued, saying the company failed to disclose the risk. Emily Harding is on the line. She's a former CIA analyst who is at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here in Washington. Welcome.
EMILY HARDING: Thank you.
INSKEEP: OK. So when we say spy in this case, we should note Alice Huang, I believe, is a Chinese national. So what is the range of actions that could fall into that word spy or spying?
HARDING: Right. So the Chinese government is infamous for taking advantage of its citizens that are in particularly key positions to help it gather intelligence. So on the top end, it may be that she was a trained and recruited spy, that she was told to go after this particular target. And she may have succeeded. On the bottom end, however, it may have been that she was a Chinese national who was just out there doing business. And perhaps her government said, hey, as long as you're sitting next to Jensen Huang, we'd like you to ask him a couple additional questions and tell us what he says. There's a wide range of possibilities there. The way that the Chinese government goes about espionage is it's really a whole-of-government and a whole-of-society operation.
INSKEEP: Oh, well, let's talk that through, because we have, in this case, a tech company that Alice Huang was working for that was not very old, I believe - only a few years old. They're operating outside the United States. They're buying these high-tech chips. What are the different ways that China might try to penetrate a company like that, and for what reasons?
HARDING: So it's important to say that we don't really know enough about this particular situation to judge what happened. But if you look at the fact pattern, it is really interesting that this company was new, that it was in a position to go after this very particular technology that's really high value for China and that she just happened to be this pattern of things that perhaps might appeal to somebody like Jensen Huang. She could be a business partner and also perhaps somebody who he enjoyed hanging out with, I don't know. It's hard to say yet. But if you look at what China usually does to go after really high-value targets, this kind of fits that pattern.
INSKEEP: Tell me a little bit more about that pattern. What are the kinds of things that China has done over the last 20 or 30 years?
HARDING: Sure. So they have been really leaning hard into economic espionage. Usually, when we think about classic spy movies, you know, it's spy versus spy, it's government versus government, somebody going after a very high-ranking official inside the government or inside the military, as we heard with the Iran story earlier. China, however, has recognized that a lot of the value to be gained is really in the private sector. So they have put people in front of business executives or academics or researchers - people who are conducting startups.
They're infamous for their economic espionage, their stealing of IP online, their cyber espionage. So they've really leaned into that particular target and applied the same spy tradecraft to those targets as they would to government targets. And, I mean, frankly, it's a softer target. The people in industry are going to be far less suspicious, far less on their guard, perhaps more willing to open the door to somebody who seems like an attractive business partner.
INSKEEP: Now, you said IP, intellectual property. That's one of the things you would try to steal here, I guess, is knowledge. But in the case of chips, there's not only knowledge, there's just boxes of chips. China can't get enough chips.
HARDING: (Laughter) Yeah. I mean, she may have been in a position to reroute chips from her company directly into China, where, in theory, China could reverse-engineer these very sophisticated chips and try to create them on their own and get around U.S. export controls. She may have also been in a position not only to collection, but also to shape the thinking. If she was in a position to perhaps ask Jensen Huang to do particular things and then take that back to the U.S. government, that could be very valuable for China.
INSKEEP: And I guess we should note he's close to President Trump. Just very briefly, does the United States spy on China in about the same way?
HARDING: Never. Of course not. No way.
(LAUGHTER)
INSKEEP: Thanks for clearing that up. No, go on.
HARDING: Yeah. No, I mean, clearly China is a high-intelligence target. Now, the U.S. has very particular rules about who we can and cannot use for that kind of activity. And we don't generally engage in this particular kind of activity.
INSKEEP: Emily Harding, former CIA analyst, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Thanks so much.
HARDING: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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