Biden planning new crackdown on China defence industry: Report
US President Joe Biden is finalising an executive order to restrict American investment in China’s defence industry, the move which is likely to further ratchet up a campaign that Beijing calls 'economic coercion', according to a report
President Joe Biden. AP File
US President Joe Biden is finalising an executive order to restrict American investment in China’s defence industry, the move which is likely to further ratchet up a campaign that Beijing calls “economic coercion”, according to a report.
According to a Russia Today report, citing Axios, the order will be released later this summer.
Rumors of an impending order have circulated in the US media since April, but Axios’ sources said that work on the decree was slowed by Washington’s efforts to convince its G7 allies to issue similar restrictions.
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“Clear progress” on this issue was made at the G7 summit in Japan this month, the report cited a source as saying.
Uncertainty exists around how widely the decree would define China’s “defence industry.”
The Biden administration has previously sanctioned China’s military-industrial complex, which is nearly wholly owned by the government.
According to a Bloomberg report last month, the edict will instead cover “the fields of semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing,” stressing that all of these technologies have military uses.
In last October, the Biden administration published a sweeping set of export controls, including a measure to cut China off from certain semiconductor chips made anywhere in the world with US tools, vastly expanding its reach in its attempt to slow Beijing’s technological and military advances.
Furthermore, the US is currently in talks with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to formalise the so-called ‘Chip 4 Alliance,’ which Beijing sees as an attempt to exclude China from semiconductor supply chains.
Biden and his representatives defend these actions on the grounds of national security, but Wang Wenbin, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, asserted last month that Washington’s “real goal is to deny China its development rights. It is pure economic coercion.”
Beijing responded to the semiconductor export controls in kind, barring chips made by US firm Micron from being used in its national infrastructure and investigating the company for potential “cyberspace security risks.”
“We’re not looking to decouple from China, we’re looking to de-risk and diversify our relationship with China,” Biden said at the conclusion of the G7 summit.
However, a joint communique released by the group accused China of posing a military and economic threat to the US and its allies, to which Beijing responded by condemning the “anti-China” gathering and issuing a formal complaint to the Japanese government.
With inputs from agencies
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