AT the height of the Cold War, a top official in China’s intelligence agency said that his country would never use seduction to entrap a person.
Such tactics might be for the CIA or the KGB, the official named Kong Yuan, of the Central Investigation Department, told a group of agents in training in April 1960, but China was guided by principles. He looked at the few female comrades in the audience. “Rest assured, we will not be asking you to go run beauty traps.”
Despite that pledge, captured in a 2010 memoir by a former Chinese diplomat, China’s intelligence services have for decades used romantic entanglements to compromise or extract information from prominent people.
United States officials say China’s Ministry of State Security, which runs intelligence operations today, recruited a Chinese businesswoman to collect intelligence on Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia and one of the most powerful figures in the artificial intelligence boom.
It was not clear what role the woman, Alice Huang, or Huang Le, might have had with the Chinese spy agency. Huang was a top executive of a Singapore company that operates data centres in South-East Asia using Nvidia chips and that rents their computing power to Chinese firms.
Jensen Huang has acknowledged that he had an affair with Alice Huang. US President Donald Trump has said that Jensen Huang told him that he was not aware that the woman was a spy. China has rejected the espionage allegations against Alice Huang, calling them smears against the country. US officials have not provided evidence for their claims. Alice Huang has not responded to requests for comment.
Of Romeos and swallows
The use of relationships or seduction in the world of espionage is not new or unique to China. The tactic was made infamous by East Germany’s “Romeos,” male Stasi agents tasked with seducing the clerks of Western officials, and by the Soviet Union’s longtime use of sexual blackmail, among other examples.
What is unique about China’s use of the tactic is the amount of time invested, according to Nicholas Eftimiades, a retired senior US intelligence officer who writes about China’s espionage operations.
“They play this long term,” he said. “These are long-term relationships, sometimes marriages.”
Perhaps the most famous example involves Shi Peipu, a Peking Opera singer whose two-decade relationship with Bernard Boursicot, who worked on French diplomatic missions in Beijing and Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia, drew Boursicot into spying for China. Both were arrested in France, at which point Boursicot learned that his lover was a man. In 1986, they were convicted of espionage. Their story inspired the play M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang.
More recent cases include Christine Fang, or Fang Fang, who was believed by counterintelligence officials to be a Chinese spy, or swallow, and who was in a physical relationship with former US Representative Eric Swalwell between 2012 and 2015.
Separately, a retired US Army officer who was working as a contractor for the US Pacific Command in Hawaii was sentenced to prison in 2014 for emailing defence secrets, including details about joint training exercises between the US and South Korea, to a 27-year-old Chinese woman with whom he had been involved romantically for almost two years. In 2003, an FBI agent, James J. Smith, who worked in Chinese counterintelligence, admitted that he had an affair for nearly 20 years with a Chinese American businesswoman suspected of being a Chinese double agent. The woman, whom he had recruited as an asset, was found to have given classified US government information to Beijing.
Both the US and China appear to be concerned about the possibility of emotional or other manipulation by the other side.
Last year, the US government prohibited American personnel in China from having romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens, according to The Associated Press.
China’s intelligence agency itself frequently warns its citizens to look out for foreign operatives attempting to trap them. In May, China’s State Security Ministry published an article on WeChat that called on residents to “be wary of sudden advances and overt displays of affection from seemingly perfect individuals of the opposite sex.”
“Avoid falling into the ‘gentle trap,’” it said.
Alex Joske, managing director at Garnaut Global, an advisory firm, said the Chinese ministry’s warnings about espionage “are usually based on the kinds of things that they do rather than what other countries actually do.”
Compared with Western intelligence agencies, the Chinese government is more willing to use blackmail and coercion in its operations, including romance and sexual activities, he argued. Western governments see blackmail as a less reliable way of motivating a source or asset, he said.
Motivation of money
Many details of the relationship between Jensen Huang and Alice Huang, including when they met and under what circumstances Alice Huang may have begun gathering information for Beijing, remain unclear.
China’s large diaspora includes executives, students and others who can be recruited in what Eftimiades calls the country’s “whole of society” approach to espionage.
Of the many cases of Chinese spying that have come to light over the past few years, only a handful involve romantic relationships. In most cases, the best motivation is money, Joske says. But when it comes to targeting wealthy elites, money is not always as powerful a recruitment tool.
“So instead, you try to co-opt someone in their circle,” he said. That includes someone with whom that person has a close relationship.
A close relationship is also conducive to another major goal of China’s intelligence operations, which is to exert influence on key decision-makers or gather information to sway other prominent figures to support policies favourable to Beijing.
“Once you become emotionally involved with somebody, your baseline judgment changes,” said Matthew Brazil, a senior fellow at The Jamestown Foundation focusing on Chinese intelligence operations. “People want to please their lovers.” — ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
