Nvidia and the Rope: How Beijing Turns Partners into Pawns
Jensen Huang’s viral interview—where he dismissed “China hawks” as unpatriotic—has caused a stir. I have a few thoughts.
First: Huang’s performance is a textbook example of Lenin’s old line: the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with. He casts Nvidia as indispensable to China’s AI future, framing U.S.–China ties as a relationship of mutual need. But Beijing doesn’t see him as a partner; it sees Nvidia as a stopgap—useful only until Chinese firms can replace it. Every chip Nvidia ships into China hastens that day, narrowing its window of dominance and eroding America’s edge. In effect, Huang isn’t strengthening his position—he’s selling himself into irrelevance.
History shows where this logic leads. The tech sector is full of such stories: Nortel, Nokia, and Ericsson once dominated China telecom industry before being undercut by Huawei and ZTE; IBM effectively seeded Lenovo by selling its PC division. Even domestic business elites during China’s reform era—including myself—believed we were building enduring partnerships, only to be discarded when the Party no longer needed us. The pattern is constant: the CCP consumes its capitalist partners once they’ve served their purpose.
Second: Huang badly misjudges his long-term relevance to China. The Party will move to replace him the moment it can. No amount of accommodation—bending the knee, flattering Beijing, or signaling loyalty—changes the fundamental fact that Nvidia is not a Party-controlled Chinese firm. It is an American company. And in Beijing’s eyes, that alone makes it politically suspect, strategically vulnerable, and ultimately expendable.
Third: We should resist the temptation to treat the business celebrity of the moment as a sage on every subject. Success often reflects circumstance more than foresight. Huang built GPUs for gaming; it was the rise of AI—not his design—that turned Nvidia into a trillion-dollar company. To his credit, he managed that wave brilliantly. But that reality should temper the weight we give to his broader insights, especially when he reduces a serious national debate to a cheap line about China hawks being “unpatriotic.”
In the end, this isn’t just about Huang or Nvidia. It’s about a larger, recurring dynamic: foreign capital mistaking access for permanence, only to learn that in Beijing’s game, partners are always pawns—and pawns are always expendable.
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Byron Wan
@Byron_Wan
Jensen Huang shows his true colors during this Bg2 Pod interview… disappointing…
Cook, Musk, and now Huang…
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