Beijing has accused the United States of using "spurious spying claims" as a pretext to impose a technological "blockade" on China, following claims that Nvidia boss Jensen Huang was the victim of a Chinese espionage plot.
"China's technological progress is driven by independent innovation and open cooperation. The US side should stop fabricating such 'spy' narratives as a pretext for imposing a technological blockade," foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told a regular briefing in Beijing on Thursday.
China has dismissed the claims about spying on Huang as "groundless speculation" and "an attempt to smear China", and said it had no information that Alice Huang, the woman at the centre of the affair, was in the Chinese capital. Taiwan has revoked her entry permit.
The furore follows reports that Huang, the co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia, had an affair with a woman US officials reportedly believe is a Chinese intelligence asset. Nvidia's board announced an investigation into the relationship, and on Thursday Huang resigned as chief executive after 33 years at the company he built into the world's most valuable chipmaker.
The scandal has rattled the technology world far beyond Nvidia. Chinese artificial intelligence firms are reportedly rushing to secure Nvidia chip capacity abroad, fearing that Washington will tighten limits on remote access to advanced chips. Nvidia's shares have fallen sharply, wiping hundreds of billions of dollars from its market value in a matter of days.
The row comes at a delicate moment in the US-China relationship. President Donald Trump is due to meet President Xi Jinping next week at the APEC gathering in Shenzhen, in southern China, where trade, technology and Taiwan are all expected to feature in their discussions.
Beijing's complaint also comes days after G7 foreign ministers said China's increasingly assertive actions in the waters east of Taiwan threatened regional stability and freedom of navigation, in a joint declaration published late on Wednesday after a meeting in Paris. China, which views Taiwan as its own territory, has stepped up activity off the island's east coast since June with regular coast guard patrols.
China's foreign ministry denounced the G7 statement as crude interference in its internal affairs and malicious slander, and insisted that Taiwan was a purely internal matter. The twin disputes — over the Nvidia affair and over Taiwan — show how quickly technology, security and geopolitics are becoming entangled.
For now, Beijing's message is that the spying allegations are a political tool rather than a security finding, designed to justify restrictions on Chinese access to advanced technology. Washington, for its part, has given no sign of softening its controls. With the Trump-Xi meeting days away, the episode is likely to hang over a summit that was supposed to steady the world's most important bilateral relationship.
