China's targeting of US firms is politically motivated, US ambassador says

The United States will push back on China’s targeting of American companies such as memory chipmaker Micron Technology Inc, a campaign Washington considers politically motivated and unfair, U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said on Wednesday.

In May, China’s cyberspace regulator said Micron Technology would be barred from selling to operators of key infrastructure. Burns said Chinese authorities have targeted five U.S. companies in recent months: Micron, Deloitte, and consultancies Bain & Company, Capvision, and Mintz Group.

“It’s not happening to companies of other countries, but it is to ours,” Burns told a U.S. Global Leadership Coalition forum in Washington via video link from Beijing.

“It looks political in nature. It looks like payback from the Chinese perspective, and it’s wrong. And obviously, we are going to resist this and we are going to push back,” Burns said.

Business groups have warned about China’s rising use of exit bans, pressure on foreign due diligence firms, and vague wording of Beijing’s new counterespionage law, which bans the transfer of information related to national security and broadens the definition of spying.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has emphasized national security since taking office in 2012. Suspicion of the U.S. and its allies has grown, yet Beijing has insisted it is opening up to overseas investment.

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The Biden administration has pushed to boost engagement with China even as ties have deteriorated over disputes ranging from military activity in the South China Sea and near Taiwan, Beijing’s human rights record, and technology competition.

Chinese officials complain that Washington has put hundreds of Chinese companies under sanctions or on export ban lists.

Burns said the U.S. was restricting American companies’ ability to sell technology such as advanced semiconductors to China so as to not give China’s military a “leg up.”

“While we compete, it is important that we manage that competition so that it has limits and barriers, and it is always a peaceful competition,” he said.

At a separate event also attended by the EU’s top diplomat for Asia, Gunnar Wiegand, U.S. Indo-Pacific Coordinator Kurt Campbell said the United States and the European Union needed to deepen discussion on technology and how to support joint development and certain “restrictions.”

Campbell stressed the need to communicate with China and highlighted an incident last week in which a Chinese warship conducted an “unsafe” maneuver in the Taiwan Strait. Campbell said mechanisms such as had existed during the Cold War were needed to avoid mishaps when warships or planes were in close proximity, but it had not yet been possible to create these with China.

“We are still relatively early in the process of this round of re-engagement, in terms of dialogue and diplomacy … And it’s uncertain what trajectory it will take,” he said.

“We’re going to seek to actually build those guardrails that will allow for greater confidence and send the signal that indeed we want to avoid a new Cold War, which we believe is not in the best interests of either country.”

Wiegand said it was “absolutely crucial” that the U.S. and China establish all channels of communication with each other again.

With inputs from agencies

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