The Biden administration is having “a lot” of conversations with China to try to convince the country to stop shipping certain dual-use goods to Russia, and some of those conversations appear to be working, said Jay Shambaugh, the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for international affairs. But Shambaugh also said the U.S. wants Beijing to do more, and the administration is analyzing whether its current trade and financial restrictions are strong enough.
Exports to China
A former top trade negotiator in Mexico, Juan Carlos Baker Pineda, said he doesn't think the review of the USMCA will be about fine-tuning or technical changes to the trade pact.
EU governments need to do more to stop China from exporting dual-use items to Russia, including by sanctioning more Chinese companies and imposing secondary sanctions on foreign banks and other entities that are helping to facilitate those transactions, three think tanks said in a recent report.
The Bureau of Industry and Security denied, revoked or didn't take action on about one-third of all license applications involving Chinese companies on the Entity List between 2018 and 2023, according to a snapshot of licensing data released by BIS July 2.
The Bureau of Industry and Security this week added six entities to the Entity List for either helping to train China’s military, evading U.S. government end-use checks or shipping export-controlled items to Russia. The agency also updated its Unverified List, adding 13 new parties and removing eight others, including one Russian company that it transferred to the Entity List earlier this year. Both rules took effect July 3.
Although Huawei has been able to overcome strict U.S. export controls to design advanced, high-performing chips in recent years (see 2403070059, 2309190052 and 2309120005), a report this month from Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology suggests that Huawei’s chip performance increase is “smaller than advertised” and the company still faces significant production limits.
While the U.S. and the EU are increasingly aligning their views on China, the two sides still don’t yet fully agree on how to use export controls, investment restrictions and other economic security tools to respond to economic and national security threats posed by Beijing, panelists during a Center for a New American Security event said last week. They also said they expect challenges facing American businesses in China to continue to grow, particularly if the U.S. pursues more trade restrictions and as Beijing builds out its anti-foreign sanctions laws.
The Biden administration is aggressively using export controls and sanctions against China, despite a lawmaker’s claims to the contrary, a State Department official told a congressional panel June 27.
Senior U.S. sanctions and export control officials recently warned a group of American CEOs to do more due diligence on their semiconductor shipments, telling them Chinese suppliers are frequently sending their products to Russia.
The Biden administration hopes that new export controls and sanctions against Russia's war machine suppliers, including China, will spur Beijing to rethink its support for Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, a State Department official said June 26.