This is your Beijing Bytes: US-China Tech War Updates podcast.

Hey listeners, Ting here, your friendly neighborhood China-and-cyber nerd, reporting from the front lines of the US‑China tech war, a.k.a. Beijing Bytes.

Let’s start with the freshest zeroes and ones: in the last few days, US and Canadian cybersecurity agencies, including CISA and the NSA, dropped a joint advisory saying China-linked hackers deployed a malware family called Brickstorm to burrow into government and IT networks and just… stay there. According to Reuters’ account of that advisory, the attackers sat inside some victim environments from April 2024 all the way through early September 2025, quietly stealing logins and sensitive data and targeting Broadcom’s VMware vSphere for long-term control. The Chinese embassy’s Liu Pengyu, as usual, denied everything, but from a tradecraft perspective this looks like classic state-backed prepositioning: build footholds now, keep options open for disruption later.

Zoom out, and the US just rewired its whole doctrine. Modern Diplomacy’s analysis of the new 2025 US National Security Strategy says Washington will keep restricting transfers of advanced technologies and ramp domestic production of strategic hardware, while trying to avoid full-on confrontation. The Geopolity and the Wall Street Journal both note the NSS no longer calls China the singular top challenge, but it doubles down on stopping any power, clearly meaning Beijing, from dominating the Indo‑Pacific or seizing Taiwan. So the line is: less “crush China everywhere,” more “deny hegemony, weaponize tech controls.”

On Capitol Hill, that gets teeth. Bloomberg and US tech press report that a bipartisan group of senators has introduced a bill to lock current AI chip export controls to China into law, preventing the Trump administration from quietly loosening them later. Think of it as turning temporary Nvidia-and-friends pain into permanent structure. A CSIS-cited analysis on AI infrastructure warns that these export curbs, while slowing China’s AI hardware climb, also starve US chipmakers of Chinese revenue they need for cutting-edge fabs. Short term, China’s forced onto less efficient domestic silicon; long term, the risk is balkanized AI ecosystems and duplicated, wasteful capacity on both sides.

Beijing isn’t just taking the punch; it’s reshaping the ring. The China Policy “mini tactical win” brief describes a November push for “scenario cultivation” and a de facto Plan B for tech autarky, with auto and EV chip supply chains being yanked home as fast as possible. Meanwhile economist Justin Yifu Lin, via Pekingnology, argues US restrictions are forcing China to pour massive resources into breaking foreign chokepoints—slowing growth now but potentially hardening long-term self‑reliance.

Strategically, this all points to a colder, more structured tech war: entrenched export bans, mirrored industrial policies, persistent cyber campaigns like Brickstorm, and AI races gated by power grids, fabs, and sanctions lists. Expect more covert Chinese operations against Western cloud and virtualization stacks, more American pressure on allies like the Netherlands and Japan over tools and lithography, and a world where every advanced chip is also a geopolitical statement.

I’m Ting, thanks for tuning in to Beijing Bytes: US‑China Tech War Updates. Don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss the next exploit.

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