Mark Dallas, a Union College professor of political science, Asian studies and technology, has joined the Bureau of Industry and Security on temporary assignment as a senior adviser, he announced last week on LinkedIn. While on leave from his teaching job, Dallas said he will work on China export controls and provide “support” in the agency’s Office of Technology Evaluation on “cutting-edge technology R&D in US, China and Europe.” Dallas, who is also a China fellow with the Wilson Center, also will help with issues involving “emerging commercial technologies.”
Although U.S. officials say export controls on advanced semiconductors and related equipment are designed to slow Chinese technological innovation, those controls have so far hurt American toolmakers the most, a technology policy expert said.
EU countries need to do more to track China’s progress in semiconductors, electric vehicles, solar panels and other technologies, European researchers said last week, warning that Beijing is increasingly turning to export controls to test where it can best “exploit dependencies” by other major economies that are imposing their own technology trade restrictions against China. They added that China’s export licensing decisions have so far been “highly opaque” and sometimes appear biased, generating fear among western countries that the controls are solely being used as a trade retaliation tool.
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.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee on May 16 approved several bills that could impose sanctions on China, Russia and the Houthis and tighten export controls on China.
The International Trade Commission is preparing for new Chinese export controls on germanium and gallium to have a potentially “significant” impact on global supply chains, it said in a recently issued executive trade briefing (see 2307050018).
Four lawmakers are urging the Biden administration to consider placing Chinese biotech company WuXi AppTec and its subsidiaries on the Commerce Department’s Entity List, the Treasury Department’s Non-Specially Designated Nationals Chinese Military-Industrial Complex Companies List and the Defense Department’s Chinese Military Companies List. They said the firm has close ties to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and has been involved in perpetrating the CCP's human rights violations.
Technology companies, trade groups, think tanks and researchers urged the government to be cautious as it evaluates its semiconductor-related export controls and prepares new ones, warning that misguided restrictions could cede American technology leadership to China, hurt the competitiveness of U.S. companies and raise the complexity of an already fraught compliance landscape.
As the U.S. pursues new export controls on emerging technologies destined to China, it’s also focusing heavily on updating existing controls to close loopholes and keep pace with technological changes, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said this week.
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.”