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

Alright listeners, I'm Ting and welcome back to Beijing Bytes. Let me cut straight to it because the past couple weeks have been absolutely bananas in the US-China tech arena, and you're going to want to know what's happening.

First up, let's talk about the elephant in the room: the Salt Typhoon cyberattack. A former FBI official named Cynthia Kaiser stated that every American has likely been impacted by this Chinese state-sponsored operation that targeted telecommunications infrastructure across the country. We're talking about a five-year campaign where hackers had what security expert Pete Nicoletti from Check Point called full reign access to phone calls and text messages. And here's the kicker, your grandmother reminding you to pick up groceries? They could listen to that. But they were specifically targeting people like Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Kamala Harris. The scary part isn't what they did, it's what cybersecurity professionals worry they're still doing right now, embedded in systems nobody's found yet.

Now here's where it gets interesting on the diplomatic front. Trump met with Xi Jinping back in October in South Korea, and according to Foreign Policy analyst Robert Manning, the US appears to be moving beyond anger toward actually managing differences with China. They rolled back tariffs to around forty-five percent on average, lower than what the US charges India or Brazil. Trump suspended tariffs on fentanyl precursors, held off adding Chinese companies to the Entity List for a year, and agreed to exchange summits. Xi's going to Beijing next spring. But here's the thing, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, China's proven to be unreliable on commitments. They were supposed to ease up on rare earth export restrictions but kept some in place. Bessent's making it clear, if Beijing backtracks, tariffs are getting hiked again.

Speaking of technology, the AI chip war is heating up. Because of US export restrictions, Nvidia can't send its best GPUs to China anymore. Chinese officials have even told companies not to buy Nvidia's H20 processors. So what happens? Chinese firms like Baidu are scrambling to develop domestic alternatives. Chinese IT companies including Alibaba and Tencent are warning investors that for the next two to three years, the bottleneck won't be demand for AI chips, it'll be supply. That's a massive market opportunity for whoever solves it first.

Meanwhile, China's economy is struggling. Factory activity contracted for the eighth month in November with the PMI hitting forty-nine point two, below the fifty-point threshold. The property market is still tanking consumer confidence, and while the government rolled out subsidies for appliances and electric vehicles, those are being phased out.

The bottom line? We're watching a managed competition now instead of free-for-all escalation, but trust me, the underlying structural tensions on technology, rare earths, artificial intelligence, and military capabilities aren't going anywhere. This is just round one of a much longer match.

Thanks so much for tuning in listeners. Make sure to subscribe for more updates on the tech battles shaping our world. This has been Beijing Bytes, a Quiet Please production. For more, check out quietplease dot ai.

For more http://www.quietplease.ai


Get the best deals https://amzn.to/3ODvOta

This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI