Beijing Seen as Likely to Push for Easing of Export Controls, Entity Listings in US Trade Talks

Thomas Christensen, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said he doesn’t think the U.S. should continue negotiating away export controls over advanced chips, as it apparently did when it announced plans earlier this year to allow Nvidia to sell its previously restricted H20 chips to China (see 2509260019). But Christensen, the Pritzker Chair in the Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he expects China to continue seeking "reductions" in those U.S. export controls because of the progress it has already made with the H20s.

Christensen said he’s expecting Beijing to specifically ask for looser controls over more types of advanced chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment. He also said he believes China will ask the U.S. for a “pause and perhaps a reversal in the trend of listing more and more Chinese entities” on the Commerce Department's Entity List.

He added that the chip technologies “shouldn’t be on the table” because of their potential military uses, but “I'm fairly certain it will be put on the table, because I hear -- just in track two discussions -- that it's on the table from the Chinese perspective.

“So that makes me nervous,” he said during an Oct. 6 event hosted by CSIS.

Christensen, who served as deputy assistant secretary from 2006 to 2008, said there is a “list” of technologies that the U.S. doesn’t sell to China because those items can support China’s military modernization, and advanced semiconductors should be on that list. Export controls over chips are “national security measures designed to slow” China’s military, not as “trade bargaining chips, and I hope they're not treated as such,” he said.

“And I think the on-again, off-again treatment of the Nvidia H20 chip this year has clouded the distinctions in those categories to some degree, but I hope that we keep our existing restrictions in place and do not bargain them away on other trade issues.”

He added that national security-related export controls shouldn’t be lifted or paused for the sole purpose of helping U.S. commercial sales.

“We didn't negotiate over it” when he worked for the government, Christensen said. “We didn't say, ‘If you act nicer to Taiwan, we will sell you this equipment.’ It just wasn't on the table. We listened to their complaints and we told them we're not going to do it.”

Henrietta Levin, a CSIS senior fellow and former director for China with the Biden White House, said Beijing likely believes its trade leverage over the U.S. is increasing, partly because Trump has at times signaled an eagerness to strike a deal with China. Ilaria Mazzocco, also a CSIS senior fellow, also noted that Beijing has become more “confident” in recent months after realizing the leverage it wielded over exports of rare earth minerals (see 2506270009).

Levin said she feels China believes their leverage “has been wielded successfully to secure at least initial concessions on really important strategic issues, including Taiwan and export controls related to high-end technology.”

Levin added that she can’t see President Xi Jinping “offering meaningful concessions” in trade talks with the U.S. “without getting far more in return.”

“It does seem like Beijing is trying to create those linkages between the economic wins -- the tactical wins that seem to be on the top of Trump's mind -- and the more traditional American national security interests,” Levin said. “And so while I do think that it's always good for the leaders of the United States and China to talk, and I do think it's achievable to try and at least further steps of mutual deescalation in the relationship,” she said she hopes any deal doesn't disproportionately “favor Beijing.”