The U.S. and the EU held the fifth meeting of the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council in Washington on Jan. 30, where the two sides again committed to increasing trade and cooperating on economic security and emerging technology issues, according to a European Commission readout of the meeting. The commission said the EU and the U.S. agreed to “explore ways to facilitate trade in goods and technologies that are vital for the green transition” and strengthen approaches to investment screening, export controls, outbound investment and “dual-use innovation.”
Electronics distribution company Broad Tech System and its president and owner, Tao Jiang of Riverside, California, pleaded guilty Jan. 11 to participating in a conspiracy to illegally ship chemicals made or distributed by a Rhode Island-based company to a Chinese firm with ties to the Chinese military, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Rhode Island announced. Jiang and Broad Tech admitted to violating the Export Control Act and conspiring to commit money laundering.
The U.S. should push for export controlled semiconductors to be installed with a mechanism that would automatically bar those chips from being used in ways that violate U.S. export restrictions, researchers said in a new report this week. They said this would significantly aid export enforcement efforts and could potentially allow compliant chip companies to sell to a broader range of customers.
A former State Department official who advised on sanctions and money laundering, who also is a co-founder of Sayari Labs, a financial intelligence and commercial data provider, said that Hudson Institute will produce a paper on creating a broad sanctions program for China, complete with the kind of language that would allow it to be executive-order ready.
An academic and journalists from England and Foreign Policy magazine agreed that President Joe Biden got more out of the meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping than Xi did.
Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba is nixing plans to spin off its cloud computing division due to “uncertainties” caused by recently updated U.S. chip export controls on China. Alibaba was planning to publicly list its Cloud Intelligence Group, a cloud computing services business, but said last week it fears “these new restrictions may materially and adversely affect” the cloud computing division’s “ability to offer products and services and to perform under existing contracts.”
CBP officers seized a shipment of China-bound deuterium cylinders that was exported without a license, the agency said in a statement on Oct. 31. The shipment, which was seized on Oct. 18 in Norfolk, Virginia, was worth a little more than $175,000, CBP said.
Although Dutch semiconductor equipment company ASML doesn’t expect the new U.S. export controls on China to have a “material effect” on the firm's financial outlook for 2023, it's preparing for the new rules to restrict more sales of its chipmaking equipment.
The U.S. should "lift" its newest semiconductor export controls on China "as soon as possible," China's Ministry of Commerce said Oct. 18, according to an unofficial translation. The ministry said the moves abuse export control measures, "generalize the concept of national security" and are "unilateral bullying." The country "will take all necessary measures to resolutely safeguard its legitimate rights and interests." The new controls were announced in two rules by the Bureau of Industry and Security this week (see 2310170055).
The Bureau of Industry and Security this week released a second correction to its final rule earlier this month that expanded the scope of its nuclear-related export controls on China and Macau (see 2308110019). The correction fixes the Commerce Country Chart that was included in the original final rule. BIS also made a fix to the rule Aug. 17, correcting an "inadvertent error” in the rule’s “regulatory instructions” (see 2308170064).