There was said to be a dossier which contained the kinks of Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American socialite whom King Edward VIII abdicated his throne to marry.

Only a few have claimed to have laid eyes on it. It allegedly detailed Simpson’s trips to China, where she is thought to have developed a taste for opium, and the brothel she frequented to learn the “Shanghai grip”. Ostensibly a sexual technique involving muscular contractions, the result is “enthrallment” to the point of “disbelief”, like “making a matchstick feel like a cigar”. The English mind could not fathom such things.

Meghan Markle also visited China before she married an English royal. In 2012, Ms Markle was part of a Suits publicity tour four years prior to snagging the ginger Prince Harry. Like his great-great-uncle, Harry then decided there were better things to pursue with his racy wife than cutting the ribbon on a cluster of prefabricated, government-subsidised homes for loopy boomers in Milton Keynes.

Asia doesn’t get the praise it deserves for honey-trapping. By order of magnitude, it is the world champion, with Russia a distant second, followed by former members of the Soviet bloc. African countries are conspicuous by their absence here; the scandalous headline “Somalian diplomat suspected of affair with Melania Trump” will likely never feature.

Latest Honeytrap

The latest Chinese honeytrap has ensnared one of the world’s smartest (and richest) men, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. By any measure, Huang is an exceptional individual: gifted, relentless, and, for the most part, principled. He is said to have been seduced by a Singapore-based technology executive called Alice Huang, suspected by the Americans of being under the thumb of Chinese intelligence.

Jensen Huang is married to his college sweetheart, Lori. His story is captured in Stephen Witt’s The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip published in 2025.

How this book became a bestseller is puzzling. It is by no means bad, but the most entertaining parts of it reveal more about the politics of the writer than anything intriguing about Huang. For example, Witt takes pleasure in projecting the differences between Huang and Elon Musk, who he obviously does not like, portraying the former as stable and normal and the latter as untrustworthy and berserk. Witt, schooled in the Associated Press’ Stylebook of capitalising the b in black (in reference to race), makes a few comments to Huang about being Asian in America, but Huang clearly doesn’t give a monkey's about this rubbish.

Writers who capitalise the b are invariably AI doomers, too, and this annoys the pants off Huang, who tells him off angrily at the end. Kris van der Bijl’s excellent review of Peter Hain’s new book also identifies this endlessly annoying habit of writers trying to shoehorn their own beliefs into their subjects or material.

Huang came from next to nothing to build Nvidia. He wasn’t alone, but stayed the course as partners quit, and survived the company’s lean years in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. In 2008, the company hit $4 billion in sales and made a profit of $800 million. It would take nine years for it to return to those metrics.

Success

What makes Huang so successful is his ability to price tomorrow into every strategic design decision. This not only explains how Nvidia recaptured, then exceeded, its former glories, but also his patience in backing certain technologies within the scope of Nvidia way before their time.

But the life of Jensen Huang, for all his wealth, is unenviable. The pressure that the founder of the world’s most valuable company is subjected to daily (from governments and institutional investors) is not something 99% of humanity could sustain for one day, let alone for extended periods. Couple that to AI jitters in capital markets, the behaviour of industry-adjacent people like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and his relationship to rationalist/altruist groups, drastic changes in policy as little as two years away and, possibly the worst of all, the expectation that he belongs to a small band of people holding the fate of America’s AI race against China in his hands, and everything seems unreasonable.

Witt makes the point that Huang spends a considerable amount of time away from home, most of it in Asia, which is how China supposedly inveigled its target. Find a top-tier customer of the chip manufacturer, school her in the ways of (possibly) Ms Simpson, create the veneer of legitimacy, and take the shot at the King.

Seen another way, minus palace intrigue, a relatively (by today’s standards of corporate stardom) normal man, who spends a lot of time away from the comforts of home, is lonely, possibly vulnerable to temptation. Perhaps he wakes up one night wracked with paranoia at the thought of having missed a great deal of life encounters, that his career has absorbed all his existence. As cosmopolitan affairs go, his part in it qualifies as one of the most normal. He is human after all, amazingly.

Democrat Honeytrap

China is so naughty, so clever. It has form with the theory illicit sex can lead to an attractive ROI; prior to this, it allegedly deployed the services of another spy called Christine Fang, or Fang Fang, into the Democrats. The target was the party’s dumbest member, Eric Swalwell, a congressman from California.

Fang Fang quickly got to work helping Swalwell lobby and fundraise, but the allure of the porcelain-skinned cupcake was too much. One of the world’s oldest fairy tales suggests that Asian women have horizontal vaginas; Swalwell, ever truth’s most self-promoting arbiter, made the decision to put the rumour to bed, and filled his boots.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation came knocking in 2015, but the matter was hushed. One explanation circulating involved Swalwell’s usefulness to Nancy Pelosi: he went on to serve on the January 6th Commission, the year after the scandal was exposed in Washington. Currently, Swalwell is the subject of multiple agency investigations into sexual misconduct.

Jensen Huang has taken a massive hit (~$7.4 billion at the time of writing) and the company has been punished. He has apologised to his family. What happens from here is surely personal; it is highly unlikely he would have divulged the secrets at the heart of the AI race. So, what would he have told Alice Huang? At a guess: the meandering ways of an otherwise ordinary man who finds himself in truly extraordinary circumstances.

[Disclosure: the contributor’s company is a Nvidia partner]