The US is to continue a ban on US investments in Chinese companies that Washington says are owned or controlled by the Chinese military, US President Joe Biden said on Tuesday.
Biden said that he would extend the restrictions laid out againt the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in an executive order written by then-US president Donald Trump in November last year.
“The PRC is increasingly exploiting United States capital to resource and to enable the development and modernization of its military, intelligence, and other security apparatuses, which continues to allow the PRC to directly threaten the United States homeland and United States forces overseas,” Biden said in a letter to US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The executive order was originally designed to deter US investment firms, pension funds and others from buying shares of Chinese firms that were designated by the US Department of Defense as backed by the Chinese military.
Biden in June made changes to what his team described as a “legally flawed” Trump-era order, tasking the US Department of the Treasury with enforcing and updating on a “rolling basis” a new list of about 59 companies that replaced the earlier list from the Pentagon.
US entities are barred from buying or selling publicly traded securities in target companies, which include China’s top chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (中芯) and China National Offshore Oil Corp (中國海洋石油).
Biden’s new list added about 10 publicly listed companies, but removed some other top names, including Commercial Aircraft Corp of China (中國商用飛機), which is spearheading efforts to compete with Boeing Co and Airbus, and two that challenged the ban in court — Gowin Semiconductor Corp (廣東高雲半導體科技) and Luokung Technology Corp (籮筐技術).
China hawks in Washington applauded Biden’s extension of the policy, but took aim at the administration’s failure to add new companies to the list since the June revisions.
“While we should applaud the extension of the ‘national emergency’ ... it’s hard to understand why not one Chinese company has been added to this modest capital markets sanctions list since the issuance of the order on June 3,” said Roger Robinson, former chairman of the congressional US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
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