Some years ago, strange circumstances resulted in my having dinner in Beijing with a low-level official from the Ministry of State Security, China’s equivalent of the K.G.B. He was an unimpressive man, drunken and piggish, and he bemoaned the unpopularity of his department. “Everyone hates us,” he complained, but then got on to what was clearly a favorite topic. Did you know, he asked me, that the K.G.B. had “schools to train beautiful women in sex?” Why did the M.S.S. not have anything like that?
That might seem like an odd grievance. The popular image of Chinese espionage is largely centered around “honey traps,” the use of sex to entrap men. After Jensen Huang, the celebrity C.E.O. of American A.I.-chip maker Nvidia, was revealed to have been in an affair with the Chinese businesswoman Alice Huang (no relation), leading to his resignation this week, it was hardly surprising that sex was one of the weapons used to target a figure so key to the messy U.S.-China tech relationship.