Chips, Hacks, and Rare Earth Smackdowns: US-China Tech Tango Heats Up!

This is your Beijing Bytes: US-China Tech War Updates podcast.

Hey, listeners—Ting here, your byte-sized Beijing buster and the only show host who can tell a Xi from a chipset faster than you can say semiconductor. Buckle up, because the US-China tech war has been running hotter than a GPU in a crypto mine, and the past two weeks have been a wild ride for anyone watching cyber, chips, and policy shuffles.

First, the headliner: In a plot twist straight from the ‘will-they-won’t-they’ files, US and Chinese negotiators hammered out a preliminary trade truce during the ASEAN summit in Kuala Lumpur. The headline? Both sides agreed—at least in principle—to pull back from that looming 100% tariff wall on Chinese tech imports, and Beijing’s tough new curbs on rare earth exports get the pause button for at least a year. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called this a "very successful framework." President Trump and Xi Jinping are set to finalize details later this week in South Korea. If sealed, this would keep Chinese-made PC components flowing and dodge disaster for everyone from motherboard makers to American farmers—yes, soybeans got their own cameo, too.

Don’t break out the baijiu just yet. The elephant in the datacenter is that all these joyous trade noises do not affect the hard, separate controls both sides keep flexing on high-performance chips. Nvidia’s AI silicon isn’t getting a shortcut into Chinese compute racks anytime soon, and nobody blinked on the ban lists for key tech.

Now, let’s crack open the cyber vaults. It wouldn’t be a tech war update without some headline-grabbing hacks. This week, China-based threat actors were all over the cyber-news. Security Affairs reports that Chinese APT groups successfully exploited major vulnerabilities like the ToolShell SharePoint flaw and Citrix NetScaler exploits to breach telecom targets in Europe and the Middle East, even after patches were issued. These incidents reinforce what most CISOs already know: patch, pray, repeat.

Meanwhile, over on the ransomware front, things got wild. Qilin, the Russia-based ransomware syndicate that operates Ransomware-as-a-Service, surpassed its 700th attack of 2025. Its affiliates—some suspected to have Chinese connections—targeted everything from manufacturing giants like Asahi to government agencies. Qilin’s operation is now one of the world’s most prolific, with the US suffering more attacks than any other country. In October alone, Qilin ramped up its assaults, making 2025’s cyber landscape feel like a tightrope walk over a flaming firewall.

What does this all mean? Industry leaders are cautiously optimistic about short-term supply chain relief, as reported by Tom’s Hardware and Fortune, but underlying strategic tensions are stronger than a tungsten carbide cutting bit. China still dominates rare-earth processing—over 80% of global supply—and every new export restriction, pause or not, sends shockwaves through tech manufacturing, from hard drive magnets to chip packaging. In the US, export controls on advanced chips still threaten China’s ambitions for AI and quantum supremacy.

Expert forecasts? Expect more strategic cat-and-mouse. Trade frameworks may cool things down for now, but both nations are doubling down on self-reliance and shoring up cyber defenses. Cyberattacks will keep surging—especially as Chinese APTs and services like Qilin diversify their playbooks. Nobody’s blinking in the chip war, and the rare earth tug-of-war is paused, not over.

That wraps your Beijing Bytes for now—thanks for tuning in! Subscribe for next week's byte-sized drama and don’t forget: hacks wait for no one. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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