Two senior US representatives on Friday pressed US President Joe Biden’s administration for tougher enforcement of export controls on sending advanced computing chips and the tools to make them to China.
In a letter to National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, US Representatives Michael McCaul and Mike Gallagher — chairmen of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee and House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party respectively — said that new advances by China’s top chipmaker show that a sweeping set of rules rolled out a year ago this month need updating to close what the lawmakers called loopholes.
The letter came after Huawei Technologies Co (華為) unveiled a new Mate 60 Pro smartphone that contained advanced chips made by China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際) despite US sanctions.
Photo: Carlos Garcia Rawlins, Reuters
“The October 7 [last year] rules and SMIC’s growing capabilities reveal a stagnant, obscured bureaucracy that does not understand China’s industrial policy, does not understand China’s military goals and does not understand technology at all — and does not have the will to act,” McCaul and Gallagher said in the letter.
The lawmakers urged the Biden administration to update the rules and take immediate action against Huawei and SMIC. They also urged the White House to cut off Chinese companies’ access to powerful artificial intelligence chips accessed through cloud computing services and to start enforcing the administration’s own rules around placing restrictions on Chinese companies that do not allow US officials to verify whether Chinese companies are complying with US export rules.
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