I think the smuggling and the general desire to continue exporting to China is the key here, and that Alice Huang being a spy is bullshit. I think she’s a chip smuggler, something that the Chinese state has been trying to curtail, because it wants to develop its own domestic chip industry that’s no longer depended on Western chip manufacturers. That’s why millions of NVIDIA chips are currently quarantined at Hong Kong ports.

I think this is a fight between two factions of big capital, one that wants to constrain China and another that wants to continue profiting from China.