Also, just to be clear here: the story is that Jensen was also going to Taiwan to meet with this person who was helping Alibaba evade sanctions, when Jensen met with this person Alibaba reps were always there, and in the US Jensen was making media appearances saying that sanctions on China had to be lifted.
Bear in mind that multiple people at Supermicro were charged for allegedly smuggling servers to China, and that the reason Megaspeed is being investigated is for effectively the same thing. Jensen denied he had anything to do with Supermicro, it is going to be much harder to say the same thing here.
I don't think the affair itself is necessarily related to the direction this will shortly take.
What you need to be a smuggler is to avoid prison.
When one side is fully aware that you are a smuggler that they can rat on to the other side whenever they want, even a child could blackmail you.
So that's one (fairly realistic imo) pathway from smuggler -> to espionage.
This is a hypothetical anyways.
MLK Jr. was being monitored by the FBI and CIA, who believed he was a Communist.
IMHO, I’m speculating, but I think the affair could’ve happened first, and then the MSS got involved for access and blackmail.
There is, after all, statistically a high correlation with rich billionaires and infidelity…