Some issues had gone overlooked in the conversation about the Biden administration’s drive to seek further engagement with China.
During a Senate Banking Committee hearing this week, Senator Bill Hagerty posed a series of questions that have gone overlooked in the conversation about the Biden administration’s drive to seek further engagement with China.
The session, called “Countering China: Advancing U.S. National Security, Economic Security, and Foreign Policy,” brought together several of the U.S. government’s top officials on economic statecraft with a focus on China on Wednesday.
Hagerty began his questioning by pointing out that Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told Congress in April that the administration had put over 200 Chinese companies on the Commerce Department’s blacklist, called the entity list. “This statistic appears like an accomplishment at face value, but it falls drastically short of the previous administration’s standard,” he continued.
Hagerty then cited data pulled from the federal register, to explain that the Trump administration designated 147 Chinese firms in 2020. In 2021, designations decreased, with 85 designations that year, and 68 further designations in 2022. (There’s no full-year data for 2023 yet, though subtracting those two years from the 205 cited by Raimondo suggests that there were 52 designations in early 2023.)
This is significant, because the Trump and Biden administrations have used the entity list to counter Chinese firms involved in a range of malign behaviors, including human-rights abuses and military and surveillance activities. It’s a critical foreign-policy tool that’s moved the Commerce Department to the forefront of Washington’s national-security conversation, also playing a role in the Biden administration’s campaign to choke off China’s access to advanced semiconductors. Any drop-off in its use would be a noteworthy development.
Responding to a question from Hagerty asking for the reason behind the apparent decrease, Thea Rozman Kendler, the assistant secretary of commerce for export administration, said that she believes 205 entities have been added to the list under the current administration, effectively sticking to Raimondo’s line.
Pressed on this again by the senator, Rozman Kendler stuck to her answer about the 205 additions, while suggesting that Hagerty had the incorrect data. “We are deeply focused as one of the two pillars of export controls on entities that pose national security and foreign policy threats to the United States, particularly in China,” she added.
While the apparent drop-off from 2020 identified by Hagerty could be explained by several factors, such as, in 2021, the then-incoming administration’s work to craft a China policy, then in 2022, the U.S. government’s pivot to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Rozman Kendler didn’t attempt to offer a substantive explanation.
Another potential explanation could be the administration’s ongoing drive to seek engagement with the Chinese government. That process has already resulted in the delay of some actions to counter Beijing. As Hagerty went on to note, the State Department reportedly chose to delay further export controls targeting Huawei as Secretary of State Antony Blinken sought a meeting with Chinese officials in Beijing. Asked about those reports, and if Commerce was asked to stand down on the Huawei restrictions, Rozman Kendler only offered an answer that did not directly address the question: “We are working closely and we are under deep analysis of this issue.”