The Commerce Department should expand an exemption to allow U.S. companies to participate in standards-setting bodies that have members designated on the Entity List, the Information Technology Industry Council said in a set of recommendations to the Biden administration. If the exemption isn’t expanded, the U.S. will risk ceding further “ground, influence, and leadership to foreign competitors” in international technology standards development, ITI said Thursday. ITI also urged the administration to shift its China trade policy to better pressure the government on important trade issues. “Recent overreliance and expanded use of export controls, tariffs, and policies misdirected at routine technical standards development have hurt U.S. workers, consumers, and companies,” ITI said. “The Administration should amend policies that have not achieved their goals and even impeded U.S. innovation and leadership.”

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative should establish a “comprehensive” exclusion process to bring relief to importers with exposure to the Section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports, senators wrote in a bipartisan letter to USTR Katherine Tai Monday. Enabling businesses affected by the tariffs “to apply for limited, yet renewable, relief is a valuable component of our strategy to counter China’s unfair trade practices,” the 41 lawmakers said. “We believe that restarting a full exclusion process can allow the United States to continue to maintain pressure on China, while providing relief to the economic pain facing businesses and workers across the country.” For any exclusions granted under the new process, “we believe relief must be meaningfully retroactive” to the date the tariffs took effect, they said. “The exclusion process should prioritize transparency, speed, consistency, and fairness.” To ease USTR’s administrative burden of doing so, “we suggest presumptively excluding any product for which imports from China represent nearly all imports to the United States,” said the senators. “Even years after the Section 301 tariffs were imposed, the exceptional reliance on China for those specific imports suggests that moving these supply chains out of China is uniquely unlikely, and that our efforts to diversify production locales and rescore manufacturing would be better spent on other products.” USTR didn’t respond to requests for comment. Customs and Border Protection collected nearly $125 billion in four rounds of Section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports through Feb. 2 since the first of the tariffs took effect in July 2018.

The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security is adding 33 Chinese entities to its "unverified list" for export restrictions, including universities and companies operating in China's tech and electronics sectors, says Tuesday's Federal Register. BIS was unable to verify the entities' “legitimacy and reliability” through ordinary "end-use checks," including their ability to responsibly receive controlled U.S. exports, it said. BIS suspended all export license exceptions for the entities, effective Tuesday, it said. Export shipments already on the water Tuesday to the newly restricted entities may proceed to their destinations under the goods' previous eligibility, it said. The Chinese Embassy in Washington didn't comment.

Federal prosecutors allege that China’s Hytera Communications recruited and hired Motorola Solutions employees to steal trade secrets from Motorola. An indictment was partially unsealed in U.S. District Court in Chicago. “As alleged, from 2007 to 2020, Hytera and the recruited employees used Motorola’s proprietary and trade secret information to accelerate the development of Hytera’s [digital mobile radio] products, train Hytera employees, and market and sell Hytera’s DMR products throughout the world,” DOJ said Monday: “Hytera paid the recruited employees higher salaries and benefits than what they received at Motorola.” Hytera didn’t comment. The company faces a potential criminal fine of three times the value of the stolen technology “including expenses for research, design, and other costs that it avoided,” DOJ said.

The U.S.-European Union Trade and Technology Council shouldn't be seen as a prelude to reentering talks for a comprehensive trade agreement, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai told the Institute of International and European Affairs webinar Wednesday. Though Tai said she would never say never about a new U.S.-EU trade agreement, she thinks the TTC "is quite a comprehensive approach to the most pressing issues," and said she's enthusiastic about its responsiveness to current trade challenges. The TTC held its inaugural meeting Sept. 29 in Pittsburgh, where it agreed to set in motion 10 working groups to address specific tasks before it meets again in the spring (see 2110010037).

As part of its increased economic initiatives in the Indo-Pacific, the Biden administration “should pursue agreements with binding commitments on digital trade,” while recognizing the region’s significance as “a hub of vital economic trade partners and a rule-maker in its own right,” blogged Michaela Wong, Information Technology Industry Council senior policy manager-Asia. “A more traditional digital trade agreement would enable the U.S. to secure those binding commitments, while serving as one of the most effective foreign policy tools for the administration to balance against China’s economic, diplomatic, and strategic influence,” said Wong Monday. “If the U.S. continues to lurk around the edges without initiating negotiations and enshrining strong digital trade norms, Beijing will certainly fill the void in discussions on trade, investment, and digital infrastructure.”

The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act “maliciously denigrates the human rights situation in China’s Xinjiang region in disregard of facts and truth,” said a Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson. President Joe Biden signed the measure into law Thursday, using his Tariff Act Section 307 authority to ban imports originating in Xinjiang unless the importer of record shows U.S. Customs and Border Protection “clear and convincing evidence” that the goods were not produced with forced labor. U.S. allegations of forced labor and genocide in Xinjiang “are nothing but vicious lies concocted by anti-China forces,” said the ministry spokesperson Friday. The U.S. “is engaging in political manipulation and economic coercion, and seeking to undermine Xinjiang’s prosperity and stability and contain China’s development under the pretext of human rights,” he said. “China deplores and firmly rejects this.”

The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control added several more Chinese tech firms to its investment blacklist, including drone maker DJI, for allegedly helping Beijing track and detain Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. The move, announced Thursday, also banned investments in Cloudwalk Technology, Dawning Information Industry, Leon Technology, Megvii Technology, Netposa Technologies, Xiamen Meiya Pico Information and Yitu. All were already on the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security entity list for export restrictions. The companies, which are now formally designated as having ties to the Chinese military, operate in China’s surveillance technology sector, OFAC said. The agency said DJI, the world’s largest commercial drone producer, supplies drones to the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau, which was added to the entity list in 2019. Technology supplied by the companies helped Xinjiang authorities confine more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in detention centers, OFAC said. The companies “actively support the biometric surveillance and tracking of ethnic and religious minorities in China” through the “installation of thousands of neighborhood police kiosks and ubiquitous placement of surveillance cameras, collection of biometric data for identification purposes, and more intrusive monitoring of internet use,” OFAC said. A DJI spokesperson declined to comment. Megvii, CloudWalk, Xiamen Meiya Pico, Yitu, and NetPosa didn’t respond to requests for comment. Dawning and Leon couldn’t be reached. "The attempt of the U.S. to use Xinjiang to contain China will never succeed," said a Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Friday. "China will take all necessary measures to resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese institutions and companies."

The Bureau of Industry and Security added 34 Chinese organizations to its entity list for actions “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests” of the U.S., says Friday’s Federal Register. The agency also modified its May 2019 Huawei entity list entry by adding three Huawei “aliases” -- HMN Technologies, Huahai Zhihui Technology and HMN Tech. The Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry didn’t comment.

Democrats want the Biden administration to designate more spyware technology companies for human rights abuses, saying this complements existing export restrictions meant to curb their sales of surveillance technology to authoritarian governments. Wednesday's letter to the Treasury and State Departments sought Magnitsky Act sanctions against United Arab Emirates-based DarkMatter, Israel-based NSO Group and European companies Nexa Technologies and Trovicor. Target the companies and their senior executives, asked House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Gregory Meeks of New York, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden of Oregon, and 16 others including Sens. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Hawaii's Brian Schatz and Reps. Anna Eshoo and Ro Khanna, both from California. State and Treasury declined to comment.