The Biden administration on Friday announced sweeping new limits on the sale of semiconductor technology to China, a step aimed at crippling Beijing’s access to critical technologies that are needed for everything from supercomputing to guiding weapons.
The moves are the clearest sign yet that a dangerous standoff between the world’s two major superpowers is increasingly playing out in the technological sphere, with the United States trying to establish a stranglehold on advanced computing and semiconductor technology that is essential to China’s military and economic ambitions.
The package of restrictions, which was released by the Commerce Department, is designed in large part to slow the progress of Chinese military programs, which use supercomputing to model nuclear blasts, guide hypersonic weapons and establish advanced networks for surveilling dissidents and minorities, among other activities.
Alan Estevez, the under secretary of commerce for industry and security, said his bureau was working to prevent China’s military, intelligence and security services from acquiring sensitive technologies with military applications.
“The threat environment is always changing, and we are updating our policies today to make sure we’re addressing the challenges posed by the P.R.C. while we continue our outreach and coordination with allies and partners,” he said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
Technology experts said the rules appeared to impose the broadest export controls issued in a decade. While similar to the Trump administration’s crackdown on the telecom giant Huawei, the new rules are far wider in scope, affecting dozens of Chinese firms. And unlike the Trump administration’s approach — which was viewed as aggressive but scattershot — the rules appear to establish a more comprehensive policy that will stop cutting-edge exports to a range of Chinese technology companies and cut off China’s nascent ability to produce advanced chips itself.
“It is an aggressive approach by the U.S. government to start to really impair the capability of China to indigenously develop certain of these critical technologies,” said Emily Kilcrease, a senior fellow at Center for a New American Security, a think tank.
Companies will no longer be allowed to supply advanced computing chips, chip-making equipment and other products to China unless they receive a special license. Most of those licenses will be denied, though certain shipments to facilities operated by U.S. companies or allied countries will be evaluated case by case, a senior administration official said in a briefing Thursday.
It remains to be seen whether the Chinese government will take action in response. Samm Sacks, a senior fellow at Yale Law School who studies technology policy in China, said the new rules could push Beijing to impose restrictions on American companies or firms from other countries that comply with U.S. rules but still want to maintain operations in China.
“The question is: Would this new package cross a red line to trigger a response that we haven’t seen before?” she said. “A lot of people are anticipating it will. I think we’ll have to wait and see.”
More on the Relations Between Asia and the U.S.
- Taiwan: American officials are intensifying efforts to build a giant stockpile of weapons in Taiwan in case China blockades the island as a prelude to an attempted invasion, according to current and former officials.
- North Korea: Pyongyang fired an intermediate range ballistic missile over Japan for the first time since 2017, when Kim Jong-un seemed intent on escalating conflict with Washington. But the international landscape has changed considerably since then.
- A Broad Partnership: The United States and 14 Pacific Island nations signed an agreement at a summit in Washington, putting climate change, economic growth and stronger security ties at the center of an American push to counter Chinese influence.
- South Korea: President Yoon Suk Yeol has aligned his country more closely with the United States, but there are limits to how far he can go without angering China or provoking North Korea.
The measures come at a particularly sensitive moment for Beijing. Chinese leaders will hold a major political meeting beginning Oct. 16, where leader Xi Jinping is expected to secure a third leadership term, becoming the country’s longest-ruling leader since Mao Zedong.
Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said the United States was trying “to use its technological prowess as an advantage to hobble and suppress the development of emerging markets and developing countries.”
“The U.S. probably hopes that China and the rest of the developing world will forever stay at the lower end of the industrial chain,” he added.
The Chinese government has invested heavily in building up its semiconductor industry, but it still lags behind the United States, Taiwan and South Korea in its ability to produce the most advanced chips. In other fields, like artificial intelligence, China is no longer significantly behind the United States, but those technologies mostly rely on advanced chips that are designed or fabricated by non-Chinese firms.
Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee, said some of China’s most advanced supercomputers depended on chips made by California-based Intel or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which uses U.S. technology in its production process and so would be subject to the new rules.
The restrictions limit U.S. exports of high-tech chips called graphic processing units, which are used to power artificial intelligence applications, and place broad limits on chips destined for supercomputers in China. The rules also bar U.S.-based companies that make the equipment used to manufacture advanced logic and memory chips from selling that machinery to China without a license.