Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo will visit Beijing and Shanghai Aug. 27-30 to meet with senior Chinese officials and business leaders, the agency announced Aug. 22. Raimondo looks “forward to constructive discussions on issues relating to the U.S.-China commercial relationship, challenges faced by U.S. businesses, and areas for potential cooperation.” China's Ministry of Commerce, according to an unofficial translation, said Raimondo's planned visit is "at the invitation of Chinese Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao." Ahead of the trip, the U.S. Commerce Department said, Raimondo met with Chinese ambassador Xie Feng and had a "productive discussion."
Exports to China
British semiconductor company Arm, in its initial U.S. public offering this week, said it’s facing uncertainty from U.S. and U.K. export controls and doesn’t expect to receive an export license to ship certain high performance processor cores to China. The company also said it’s expecting to see slower growth in its China sales revenue due to several factors, including various government-imposed “trade and national security policies.”
China is planning “countermeasures” to respond to the Biden administration's recent executive order on outbound investment, a Chinese Ministry of Commerce spokesperson told reporters this week. The spokesperson said China has “serious concerns” about the restrictions -- which will eventually lead to prohibitions and notification requirements for U.S. investment in three advanced technology sectors in China -- and said the U.S. is “harming others and harming itself.”
China’s recently imposed export controls on gallium and germanium (see 2307050018) -- two metals used to produce semiconductors -- were for legitimate national security reasons, Beijing said this week, rebuking comments from U.S. officials and lawmakers who have said the restrictions have no justification (see 2307060053). In an Aug. 9 post on Chinese social media site Weixin, the National Security Ministry said the country's national security concerns stem from an incident in 2009, when an employee working for a global mining company in China tried to access “detailed technical analysis of dozens of Chinese iron and steel enterprises and accurate parameters of each production process.”
China is not convinced that the U.S. is only trying to derisk, not decouple, from China’s economy, said Ryan Hass, a former National Security Council official. He said Beijing is wary of the growing number of U.S. sanctions and trade restrictions and doesn’t believe the Biden administration is acting in “good faith,” which risks further worsening tensions.
Congress needs to enact stronger export controls legislation to complement the Biden administration’s outbound investment restrictions against China unveiled last week (see 2308090066 and 2308100045), said House Foreign Affairs Indo-Pacific Subcommittee Chairwoman Rep. Young Kim, R-Calif. Kim said she’s “glad” the administration is “acting to restrict U.S. investment of critical technologies developed in China,” and she said the measure “should not be treated as a silver bullet.”
Citing a Financial Times report that Chinese artificial intelligence developers are evading controls on advanced semiconductors by using cloud services, members of the House introduced a bill to stop those practices, called Closing Loopholes for the Overseas Use and Development of Artificial Intelligence (CLOUD AI). The bill was introduced last month, and its text published this week.
China this week criticized the recent U.S. restrictions on outbound investment in three advanced technology sectors in China (see 2308090066).
Lawmakers, business groups and think tanks gave a mixed bag of immediate feedback on the Biden administration’s executive order restricting outbound investments in China, with some applauding the government’s initial, cautious approach, and others expressing frustration that the restrictions don’t go far enough.
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