Needless to say, US politicians who fear Chinese spying will be moaning about security and calling for a regulator or two to veto the deal. After all government intervention in business deals is what the socialist US is all about.

Tsinghua-owned Unisplendour will invest $3.78 billion in Western Digital to boost its technology portfolio. It will get to nominate a representative to the US company's board.

Western Digital, whose revenue has fallen in seven of the past nine quarters, has lost more than a third of its market value this year. Tsinghua is in the process of buying a 51 percent stake in the maker of expensive printer ink HP's China-based data-networking business.

Despite spying fears, the only country which has actually installed backdoor spyware into hardware its companies sold another government was the US who installed s. That does not mean that one day the Chinese will not get that paranoid too.