The leaders of the House Select Committee on China urged the Commerce Department Oct. 16 to restrict exports of U.S.-made semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME) to Huawei's “clandestine network” of companies.
Exports to China
The Bureau of Industry and Security appears to be making good on its pledge to step up export control enforcement to protect sensitive American technology from China, two former U.S. government officials said Oct. 15.
The Bureau of Industry and Security this week added eight companies to its Unverified List after it was unable to verify the “legitimacy and reliability” of the entities through end-use checks, including their ability to responsibly receive controlled U.S. exports. It also removed two companies from the list after BIS said it was able to successfully conduct end-use checks.
The U.S. will probably increase its use of sanctions and export controls no matter who wins the upcoming presidential election, although a Donald Trump-led administration would be more likely to pursue drastic measures that could accelerate U.S.-China decoupling, said Martin Chorzempa, a senior fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Those measures include expanding the use of the Bureau of Industry and Security’s foreign direct product rule or placing blocking sanctions on major Chinese companies such as Huawei.
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Beijing held a national conference on export controls last week, where government officials summarized Chinese export control actions over the past year and “studied and arranged the next key tasks,” according to an unofficial translation of a notice from China’s commerce ministry. Officials called for an “improvement of the modern national export control system” and added that export controls play “an increasingly important role in safeguarding national sovereignty, security, and development interests and promoting high-quality development of trade,” the ministry said.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. is increasingly requiring companies to enter into mitigation agreements before approving a deal, and those agreements are getting more complex, said a former senior government official who worked on CFIUS cases. And although some companies fear the ongoing CFIUS review of Japan’s Nippon Steel signals that the committee could be veering away from its traditional national security focus, the former official said he’s not expecting the Nippon Steel case to spark a trend of politically motivated reviews.
The U.S. last week expanded an Iran-related sanctions authority to target the country’s petroleum and petrochemical sectors and designated a host of entities and vessels that it said have shipped or traded Iranian oil products.
China opened a dispute at the World Trade Organization Oct. 11 against Turkey's 40% import duties on Chinese electric vehicles, the WTO announced. The complaint said the rate is greater than the duty rate laid out in Turkey's schedule of concessions and higher than duties on EV imports from other nations.
Australia and China agreed to a timetable for Beijing to lift import restrictions on Australian live rock lobster by the end of the year, Australia’s foreign affairs ministry announced last week. Australia said the lobsters have been “effectively prevented” from entering China’s market since 2020, but the two sides agreed to remove the trade barrier in a “step towards stabilising the bilateral relationship.”