Jupiter Systems is an American company that makes video screen technology for the U.S. military. In 2024, the government discovered something shocking — it had been sold to a Chinese tech company years earlier.
Reporters Noah Berman and Rachel Cheung are back on the podcast to go behind the scenes on their recent investigation into the sale of Jupiter Systems and how the United States government is trying to get it back.
Read their story on The Wire China here.
Transcript:
Rachel: Hi, and welcome to The Wire China podcast. I’m Rachel Cheung, a staff writer at The Wire China. Today, we aim to take you behind the scenes of the stories we cover in our magazine.
This week, I’m joined by my fellow staff writer, Noah Berman. In our latest cover story, Noah and I look into a very interesting case about a small California company called Jupiter Systems. It makes TV walls and counts every branch of the U.S. military as its clients.
But little did its federal clients know, in 2020, Jupiter was quietly sold to Suirui, a Chinese company that aspired to build China’s Zoom. So how did this acquisition happen, and how has it gone under the radar for so long? Over the past month, Noah and I have been trying to figure that out.
We spoke to current and former employees, including Sidney Rittenberg Jr., the former CEO of the company. We went through court documents, securities filings, procurement records to try and figure these questions out. We will be discussing that in a minute, but first, a quick note about our upcoming edition, which goes online Sunday evening New York time.
Our colleague, Savannah Billman, will have a story on the Chinese Academy of Science, which is both a research hub and also a major investor in technology. And Noah will have a piece on a China-linked auto firm testing U.S. rules that aim to prevent Chinese technology from powering American cars. And a Q&A with former Commerce Department official Alan Estevez on whether export controls are working.
Hi, Noah.
Noah: Hi, Rachel.
Rachel: Great to have you on.
Let’s start with the basics. We’ve been looking at this company for so long. What does Jupiter actually do?
Noah: If you’ve ever seen a movie, particularly a war movie, and you see commanders looking at a wall of TV screens, basically what Jupiter does is make the computers, the processors that connect all of those screens.
Basically, it looks like a box, but what it does is ensure that a high resolution image appears on each of them and sometimes can connect them together. And Jupiter later went on to make those screens themselves as well.
Rachel: So a key point of our story is that Jupiter is supplying U.S. military, but it was sold to a Chinese group in 2020 for $7.5 million. And before that sale, it was actually already owned by another company, as we found out during our investigation.
Can you tell us more about that?
Noah: It helps to go back more than a decade to 2015, when the founder of Jupiter Systems died. And after that, the company was sold.
It was sold to a company called InFocus, which was based in Oregon and was a manufacturer of projectors. But InFocus was tied to another firm that has a long history and many operations in China, and that is Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics giant best known for making all of our Apple products. The person who owned InFocus at the time was named John Hui, and he concurrently served as the chief strategy officer at Foxconn, according to security filings that we reviewed.
And to buy InFocus, he borrowed $45 million from an offshore fund in the Cayman Islands, whose only current director is a Foxconn executive named Huang Qiu-lian, whose nickname is Money Mama. And we learned from our reporting that InFocus executives would make regular trips to Foxconn in Shenzhen. At some point, they decided to make it official and move Jupiter Systems on paper from InFocus to a Foxconn subsidiary, an investment vehicle known as iCreate Investments.
So when Suirui disclosed that it had purchased Jupiter Systems, as you noted in 2020, it said that it bought Jupiter from iCreate.
Rachel: So essentially, Suirui Group acquired Jupiter from Foxconn, and this sale wouldn’t have been possible without one person. That is Sidney Rittenberg Jr. It might be a familiar name to our audience.
His father, also named Sidney Rittenberg, was an American that joined the Chinese Communist Party and became an aide to Chairman Mao Zedong, even though that lent him in prison a couple of times. This is his son, Sidney Rittenberg Jr., who is also known as Li Xiaoming and worked at a subsidiary of Foxconn at the time. What is his role in the deal?
Noah: So on Rittenberg Sr., as you noted famously, an American aide to Mao Zedong.
After he left China, though, in 1980, he built a business helping American companies enter China and later made millions that way. And Rittenberg Jr., his son, grew up in both China and the U.S. One of his early jobs was actually working for his dad’s business. And in the mid-2000s, he actually worked at InFocus, too, before John Hui bought it.
He went on to some other roles, but eventually Hui introduced him to Foxconn. And when he was there, Foxconn founder Terry Gou invited a Chinese entrepreneur named Shu Cheng, whose English name is Forrest, to pitch at Foxconn’s headquarters in Shenzhen. And Shu spoke so convincingly that he ended up staying for a couple of days rather than a couple of hours as the original plan held.
And so not long after that, a man named Tim Chen, who was the chairman of a Foxconn subsidiary, goes along to Suirui to become co-chairman there. And Rittenberg follows Chen to oversee product development and design at Suirui. The acquisition made sense for Shu because he wanted to buy an established Western hardware brand, which he believed would give Suirui prestige.
And he had asked Rittenberg if Foxconn would sell any that it owned. Jupiter was the cheapest and therefore the easiest for Suirui to acquire. And after it closed, Rittenberg became the CEO of Jupiter.
But Rachel, to take a step back here, who is Shu Cheng and what is Suirui’s business?
Rachel: So this is very interesting because until we start working on this story, I’ve never actually heard of Suirui Group at all. And I think I can say that for a lot of people. The thing about Suirui Group is that it’s not really a very successful company.
Shu Cheng, the entrepreneur and the founder, he went to local universities. He worked a little bit in Microsoft China and had started this company in 2006. It listed on a new third board in 2016 and then delist a few years later.
When I look at all the procurement records, it also doesn’t seem like they have a lot of business. So he aspired to build China’s Zoom and they do video communications software, a little bit similar like Zoom. They also have some other sort of businesses as well.
A lot of their business actually came from China Mobile, which is a stakeholder. They also have sold equipment to a government office here and there, but it’s all very small amount. One of their biggest achievements is providing software through the Winter Olympics.
And besides that, I think there’s hardly anything very notable. I think one reason why I was looking for a hardware component through their business is that it’s very hard to sell software in China. There’s a lack of software market.
Consumers are not willing to pay for it and neither enterprises. And so I think they really wanted a hardware to complement their business. And that’s why they were interested in Jupiter.
So the question for me is, despite brokering the deal, Rittenberg actually did not have a very good time at the company. He viewed it with Shu Cheng throughout the whole time. So what is all that about?
Noah: Well, according to Rittenberg, there were a couple of problems.
He said one of them was that Shu was constantly pressuring him to share the codes to Jupiter software and that Xu also wanted to see who Jupiter’s customers were, which included many sensitive clients in the United States, every branch of the U.S. military, many providers of critical infrastructure, etc. Rittenberg says that he refused to share that information with Shu and with Suirui because he was concerned that Suirui’s exposure to state-owned enterprises, which had invested in Suirui and military projects associated with the Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army, would, quote, gravely endanger Jupiter and customers in the United States. He said that customer data was his, quote, explosion point.
And beyond that, they also disagreed about Shu’s plans to attract local government investment in factories that would make Jupiter products. And ultimately, things came to a head. In late 2023, Xu calls a board meeting to demote Rittenberg and rather than stay on, Rittenberg resigns and leaves the company.
Rachel: So a year after that, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. started reviewing the acquisition. One question we were trying to answer this whole time is, why do you think, why did the Jupiter sale gone on the radar for so long?
Noah: The easy answer is that Jupiter and Suirui didn’t tell the government about it. Suirui was publicly traded at the time, so it did disclose the deal in its securities filings as early as January 2020.
But they didn’t file with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, as you noted, which is, for people who don’t know, this powerful interagency panel that screens deals for national security risks. And it goes by the acronym CFIUS. So Jupiter continued to sell to the U.S. government even after the sale.
It sold $46,000 worth of products to the U.S. Army alone in 2023 and 2024. And the government and the military in particular has pretty stringent vetting in its procurement process. Jupiter had to get various certifications in order to continue with those sales.
It wasn’t just the Army, it also sold to the Air Force. So it could be true as well that the government, for those four years after the acquisition and before CFIUS began looking into this, that the government just did not ask the right questions of its supplier. The review eventually led to an executive order by the Trump administration last July, where he instructed Suirui Group to divest all its rights to the company, citing national security risk.
Rachel: Can you tell us what happened since and why is this such a special case?
Noah: It’s uncommon, but not unprecedented for the White House to order the unwinding of a deal on national security risks. This was the seventh time that has ever happened. But historically, after the White House makes that type of order, companies have played ball.
What makes this case unique is that Suirui basically took its time. It missed the first deadline set by the White House, and then it missed another, and then it missed another. And CFIUS eventually just got frustrated.
From their perspective, the White House had determined that Suirui continued ownership of Jupiter was a national security risk. So missing deadlines is a big deal to them. And in February, they said, OK, well, if you’re not going to follow our deadlines, we’re going to take you to court and you’re going to have to deal with the federal judge.
That’s exactly what happened. Last month, the judge put Jupiter into receivership, severed Suirui’s control of Jupiter. But importantly, Suirui is still the owner of Jupiter Systems.
And at the same time, court records show that parts of the Defense Department have continued buying Jupiter products, even as all of this was going on, as recently as March. So clearly, the government has found some way to get comfortable with the arrangement.
Rachel: So you drove all the way to Washington to get your hands on those court documents about the trial.
It was 500 pages long. What stood out to you?
Noah: Really, the biggest thing is a window into the CFIUS process. This is typically an opaque set of discussions between companies and the government that you cannot even get access to with the Freedom of Information Act request.
But because this was the first time that the government had to go to a federal court to enforce this type of order, everything was being made public. And so we had access to all of these documents that typically would only be known to the people who worked on them. And for example, we found many examples of Jupiter’s customers.
We found how much they were selling to some of them and how others were using Jupiter’s products. We found Jupiter’s revenue, even though it’s a private company. And we have all of these other intricate details about the CFIUS process.
So one part of it is that Jupiter’s CEO filed reports to CFIUS officials every single week after the divestment order. We have months worth of those reports. They have updates on the deal talks, including which companies they were talking to, proposed term sheets.
We have the proposed mitigation terms that CFIUS offered to Jupiter Systems before the divestment order came down from the White House. And we have the exact reasoning CFIUS used to conclude that there was a risk here. And so for the record, that risk was, quote, the potential compromise of Jupiter Systems technology integrated into military and critical infrastructure systems, which could enable unauthorized access to data or disablement of critical systems.
Last question for you, Rachel. Jupiter is just one of Suirui’s problems. They’re having issues of their own in China that are unrelated.
Can you tell us about those? What’s next for Suirui?
Rachel: So there are signs of trouble at Suirui Group as well. Since 2024, Chinese courts have frozen 384 million yuan worth of equities owned by Shu Cheng and his wife, Li Sijia, according to records on Tianyancha. A court enforced a 5 million yuan judgment against the company last month, and that raised flags.
And it’s in court disputes with four domestic partners, including Alibaba’s cloud unit. Four ex-employees are taking to the arbitration court to demand unpaid wages and severance pay. And then Feng Wenlan, a co-founder who went way back with Shu Cheng, has recently quit his role as vice chairman.
But it seems like Shu Cheng and Suirui is still quite active. Suirui recently led an investment round into another company that is facing delisting risk that is exposed for fraud last year. They inject new funds into the company.
And Shu Cheng was appointed chairman and general manager at that company earlier this year. So it does seem like their story is going to continue. But where that’s leading, that’s for another day.
So what’s next for this case? Is it all settled?
Noah: Suirui is appealing. The case is going to be heard one last time by another court in Washington, in which the company will have a last chance to convince a federal judge that its ownership of Jupiter Systems does not pose an imminent national security risk.
Rachel: Well, thank you for this, Noah.
Our story is already online on our website. We’ve also taken down the paywall for this. So even if you haven’t subscribed yet, you can take a look at the story.
Up next, we have an excerpt from Noah’s Q&A discussion with Alan Estevez, who served as undersecretary of commerce for industry and security during the Biden administration. In the conversation, he argued that the U.S. export controls on China are still working in spite of China’s recent progress in AI.
Alan: Export controls are not the only tool in the toolbox.
They have a purpose. Their purpose is also going to degrade over time. So you have to keep advancing your own technology to stay ahead.
We recognize that. So essentially what you’re is you’re putting up barriers to slow potential adversary down in that space. I think we accomplished that.
We also recognize while we’re doing this that the Chinese have very good engineers. They have a lot of money to work on these problems. And they have focus on doing this so that they would certainly have the capability to develop AI tools and capabilities.
So yeah, we recognize that there would be not a huge gap, but our goal was to sustain as big a gap as we could in this space. And I think even today, the Chinese would say access to high end compute is the biggest shortfall. I mean, what DeepSeek just did with Ascend chips is more in the realm of inference than it is in training models.
Rachel: We’ll end with a clip from Kate MacKenzie of the Polycrisis Podcast on how China fits into the global energy transition. You can listen to them wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening.
Kate: China’s played a critical role in what we call the emergence of the electric world order, which is a kind of a quiet revolution in energy transition. That’s almost happening below the radar. It’s a little bit hard to trace in the data, but a lot of countries are actually switching their energy systems in different ways towards more and more renewable energy supply.
So it’s a huge change. And the volume of exports of these goods out of China is just immense. The thing is that this wasn’t really a grand plan from the Chinese central government, you know, to kind of export clean power and electrify other countries.
This is almost like a side effect of China’s own economic policy, of its own industrial strategies. So the new season, we’re calling it a bonus season. It’s actually looking at the implications of the Iran war.
This is the biggest energy shock that the world’s ever experienced because this is the first time we’ve had a big energy shock where there was also this option of actually switching out big parts of national energy systems, you know, away from oil and gas dependencies and towards like a more electrified system. That’s then inevitably like prompting questions within some countries about, oh, are we just swapping out one dependence for another? Are we just swapping out exposure to an oil and gas choke point to exposure to a solar panel choke point?
