This is your Beijing Bytes: US-China Tech War Updates podcast.
Hey listeners, Ting here with your Beijing Bytes download on the US‑China tech war, and wow, the last two weeks have been spicy.
Let’s start with the fresh exploit on everyone’s dashboards: Cisco’s zero‑day, CVE‑2025‑20393. Cisco Talos and coverage in The Hacker News say a China‑linked APT, tracked as UAT‑9686, has been quietly owning Secure Email Gateway and Secure Email and Web Manager since late November, dropping backdoors and log scrubbers on enterprise gear that literally guards the inboxes of governments and big business. ESET and others are simultaneously flagging another China‑aligned crew, LongNosedGoblin, using Windows Group Policy for deep espionage across Southeast Asia and Japan. So while Washington talks deterrence, Beijing’s operators are already in the email and the domain controllers.
Flip the board and the US is swinging back with laws instead of malware. South China Morning Post and The Star report that the latest US National Defense Authorization Act bakes in big outbound‑investment guardrails on Chinese tech with military use and clamps down on federal contracts with Chinese biotech via the Biosecure Act. That means venture money headed toward Chinese quantum, semiconductors, and AI with People’s Liberation Army ties suddenly has a giant “are you sure?” dialog box on it. The intent is to starve Beijing of US capital and data in dual‑use sectors, not just chips.
Speaking of chips, SCMP says the US Commerce Department has launched a review of Nvidia’s H200 sales into China, while lawmakers push to add DeepSeek and Xiaomi to the Pentagon’s list of Chinese military‑linked firms. At the same time, analysts quoted by SCMP and Natixis warn that China is sprinting toward its own EUV lithography and world‑class open‑weight AI models from players like Moonshot and DeepSeek. Washington tries to slow the feed; Beijing tries to rebuild the whole restaurant.
On the policy home front, China Daily details Beijing’s new platform pricing rules that slam “big data discrimination” and force transparency around algorithms, auto‑renewals, and fee structures. It’s framed as consumer protection and fair competition, but also quietly hardens control over the country’s digital platforms and the data and AI models running on them.
Strategically, experts from Goldman Sachs to Elon Musk, quoted in the Times of India, are warning that China’s exploding power capacity and nuclear build‑out could give it a long‑term edge in AI and data‑center scale, while US grids creak under demand. Combine that with tightening US investment controls and aggressive Chinese cyber operations, and you get a future where Washington leans on finance, law, and alliances, and Beijing leans on infrastructure, scale, and very persistent hackers.
Over the next year, expect more: narrower but sharper US chip and investment curbs, China racing for semiconductor self‑sufficiency, and cyber campaigns like the Cisco hack becoming the new normal background noise.
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