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Notes -
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang caught having affair with Chinese spy.
There was some discussion of this in the Sunday thread, but I think this is a big deal worth a top-level post.
The woman, Alice Huang (no relation), is an executive at Singapore-based cloud computing company Megaspeed. The official story from Nvidia, up until last week, was that this was a totally normal nothing-to-see-here business relationship with a client. Jensen himself now seems to admit this is not the case.
Jensen has been strongly opposed to chip export controls for some time. No doubt prosaic conserns about margins and market expansion were a major factor, but now we have to wonder how much corruption, blackmail, and CCP blackops might have played a role. There have been rumors of... irregularities regarding some Nvidia chip shipments to Asia. There is new reporting today that Nvidia itself intervened to squash a Commerce Department investigation into Megaspeed.
I feel like the board has to fire him after this, but on the other hand it seems almost unthinkable. Imagine Apple firing Steve Jobs. There might be pressure from investors to keep him on. It will be interesting to see how the National Security apparatus responds to such a massive persistant vulnerability if it comes to that.
So, I'm mostly just seeing a lot of jokes and memes about this. Which, understandable, it's a juicy scandal.
But one semi serious response that I saw on Twitter got me thinking. Is this just an inherent weakness in all men? An unpatchable security flaw? We're already vulnerable to just normal human temptation. What are we supposed to do when foreign governments target us with professional seductresses? Should all men in critical positions get castrated for national security?
The ancient Chinese tried that. Eunuchs ended up ruling them until the oppressed non-eunuchs slaughtered them. A general recognizing the problem and plotted their extermination, but they murder him first, then other people slaughter them. Googling this I see it also happened a second time a few centuries later in which the eunuchs won the series of plots and attempted coups and successfully slaughtered their would-be murderers and continued their unpopular rule.
Not a small number of deaths in either instance. You make men trade their balls for critical positions in the government, you'd better buckle up.
Eunuchs were not created to make un-honeypottable officials, they were created because the emperors had large harems and did not want to get cucked.
It’s important to keep in mind that everything we know about these periods was written by the political rivals of the eunuchs. Don’t fall for the Confucian officials propaganda that eunuchs always lead to corrupt rule. It’s true that they often did when child emperors were on the throne, but with powerful adult emperors, they were often effective and loyal officials. The emperors kept using them for a reason. They knew history and knew that eunuchs had a failure mode, but kept choosing to use them. It’s not like they tried them in the Han dynasty and then were like “whoops, that went poorly, let’s never do that again.” The Qing still had eunuchs 2000 years later.
The idea of eunuch officials is that since they won't get married* and have children of their own, they are now outside the kind of familial network that leads to plots around diverting royal/imperial power to your close kindred (as per the Tudor court, where the old established families feuded and schemed for power with the newcomers who rose and fell with the King's favoritism based on who was his current wife/mistress). The Empress' or favourite concubine's family might trade off that for comfy sinecures, high office, etc. but a eunuch hasn't those connections so will - at least in theory - be loyal to the Emperor above all.
Of course, that didn't stop coalition building, blocs forming behind rival claimants amongst the Emperor's sons for position as potential Crown Prince, and selling favours and access when nobles knew Eunuch Gao had the Emperor's ear, but no system is going to be 100% perfect.
Long time now since I read it, but the Dream of the Red Chamber in one of the many sub-plots shows the kind of influence, and influence-peddling, the eunuchs had at court; if they wanted to make or break a rich (or now on its uppers) family, they could do so via scheming and false reports of potential treason.
*Though apparently at some periods eunuchs could marry.
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