By Tom Fowdy
Jensen Huang, the Taiwan born CEO of Nvidia Corp, one of the most important chip producers on the planet, has been caught in a massive scandal. On 29th October, The New York Times published an expose claiming that Huang, 63, was having a (later admitted) relationship with a Chinese woman named Alice Huang (no relation), an executive at the Singapore-based company Megaspeed.
According to The New York Times, US intelligence had subsequently claimed that A. Huang was a spy recruited by China's Ministry of State Security, and subsequently had access to Jensen, with a memo having been circulated in Washington, D.C by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The resulting media firestorm has damaged the company's share price. However, Nvidia has insisted that it "has no reason to believe the company's secrets or national security were compromised."
There are many reasons to be sceptical of this story's politicized framing, even if we take into account that Jensen Huang has admitted an inappropriate extramarital relationship that could have had extraordinary geopolitical consequences. In particular, the widespread headline use of the word "spy", repeated without proof, is one such rendering. Before we look at the specifics, we must understand that American media culture, and especially so in politics, places emphasis on mass hysteria and dramatization rather than factual, cold, fact-based reporting.
This culture is a feature, rather than a bug, of the American institutional mindset, which owes its social norms to the legacy of zealous protestant Christianity. Just like there were witch hunts of old, American political culture deliberately pushes paranoia, suspicion, and "worst-case scenarios" about everything, which subsequently becomes a norm of competitive politics and foreign policy. Thus, when the United States encounters a foreign policy adversary, a media climate of extreme fear and absurdism always follows suit, which is then used to tailor policies and outcomes to a competitive advantage.
From the Red Scare to the present day, we have seen this kind of discourse many times: Saddam Hussein has got weapons of mass destruction and is going to give them to terrorists, North Korea is going to randomly launch a nuclear attack on the United States, while Chinese Confucius Institute language classes are going to spy on you and steal your intellectual property. China, of course, in recent years, has been the latest "scare" in the United States. American politicians and institutions frequently publicly accuse China of plotting to spy on them in all kinds of profound ways, even with agricultural products.
Although on the surface, the mass hysteria seems irrational, in practice it is rational, as it is deliberately used to create support for protectionist policies and, of course, maintain America's dominance in high-end technologies, AI and semiconductors. However, the English-language mainstream media, including outlets in the United Kingdom, are guilty of taking this politically opportunistic surface rhetoric and repeating it ad vertebrae without any scrutiny of the underlying motives or facts. For example, the BBC might report on comments about a Chinese product hit by American accusations by saying "there are concerns," without giving any context to the political motivations behind such. What you should also pay attention to is how all these stories are always backed up by "US intelligence", no matter how bogus they are, and this itself is treated as an authoritative source without scrutiny.
As a result, American politicians and institutions throw around the word "spy" to accuse various things related to China, in a way that is an assumption, rather than a fact, and mainstream media institutions simply follow that understanding uncritically. In doing so, the definition of "spy" has been vastly expanded, as part of a process known as "concept creep," a phenomenon also a product of the US media environment.
In 2023, mass hysteria was whipped up in relation to a high-altitude Chinese weather balloon, which became labelled by the media and politicians as a "Spy Balloon." Even though in practice it was something trivial, the name became the de facto understanding of what it was and therefore, the reality of it. The American political, and thus media ecosystem, therefore have an extraordinary power to define the discourse of the English-language world. For example, the Mike Pompeo State Department in 2020 successfully rendered a shift from the "Communist Party of China" (CPC) to the "Chinese Communist Party" (CCP), a term which has a much more loaded, racial and "yellow peril" undertone to it.
As a result, this media culture gives us a lot to think about in relation to Jensen Huang. From the American point of view, the stakes of him potentially, and accidentally leaking his company's tech know-how are huge, especially seen as the United States has put chips at the forefront of its own geopolitical agenda. However, the media and political depiction of Alice Huang as a "spy" is something that is highly questionable, if not opportunistic.
Ultimately, American institutional decision-making and judgment always pre-empts the worst-case scenario, even if that scenario may seem absurd, ridiculous, or has no basis in fact. It seems to be based on a logic that "if A can potentially happen through B, even if A is unlikely, we should therefore take no chances with B." Thus, in a media culture that brands everything as a spy, and gives no due scrutiny of the term, how can we trust it? Therein, even as Jensen Huang has owned up to his own wrongdoing, we must remain sceptical, because ultimately the media do love a good spy sex related scandal.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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