According to Axios, US President Joe Biden is finalising an executive order to limit American involvement in China’s defence industry. The measure will ratchet up a campaign that Beijing refers to as “economic coercion.”
According to Axios, who cited anonymous sources, the directive will be revealed later this summer. Rumours of an impending directive have floated in the US media since April, but according to Axios sources, work on the decree has been hampered by Washington’s efforts to persuade its G7 allies to impose similar limits.
According to one source, the G7 summit in Japan last month saw “clear progress” on this problem.
The decree does not specify how broadly it will define China’s “defence industry.” China’s military-industrial complex is nearly wholly state-owned, and the Biden administration has already approved it. Instead, according to Bloomberg, the regulation will encompass “the fields of semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing,” all of which have military uses.
Biden has already attempted to stifle Beijing’s technical advancement, setting export limits last October to prevent the sale of semiconductor gear and software to China. Furthermore, the United States is currently in talks with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to formalise the so-called ‘Chip 4 Alliance,’ which Beijing views as an attempt to isolate China from semiconductor supply chains.
While Biden and his administration justified these actions on the basis of national security, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Wang Wenbin stated last month that Washington’s “real goal is to deprive China of its development rights.” It’s nothing but economic coercion.”
Beijing reacted in kind to the semiconductor export curbs, prohibiting the use of Micron chips in its national infrastructure and examining 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 stated at the G7 summit’s conclusion. However, the group’s joint communiqué accused China of posing a military and economic danger to the United States and its allies, to which Beijing replied by criticising the “anti-China” gathering and filing a formal complaint with the Japanese government.
