International cooperation to break US chip blockade: China Daily editorial

In a move that is clearly aimed at maintaining its own advantages in high technology, the United States has once again used domestic regulatory measures in an attempt to grab Chinese technology companies by the throat.

On Monday, the US Department of Commerce announced that its Bureau of Industry and Security had added 33 Chinese enterprises to its unverified list. Their inclusion on the so-called red flag list means the Chinese companies must certify that they are complying with US regulations to continue receiving shipments from US exporters who in turn will now need a license if they want to ship products to any of the companies on the list.

The US Commerce Department justified the move by saying that the BIS "could not establish the bona fides" of the entities and could not verify their "legitimacy" through end-use checks.

Most of the companies that have been red-flagged are electronics enterprises, but state laboratories at universities and other businesses are also on the list. Most notable among the 33 companies is the Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group, which held a launch ceremony for its newly developed 2.5D/3D lithography packaging machine the day before the US Commerce Department announced its move. This is China's first domestically developed lithography machine that can package chips in a three-dimensional way for use in high-performance computing and high-end artificial intelligence applications.

Like the so-called America COMPETES Act of 2022, which was recently passed by the US House of Representatives, the move under the guise of enhancing the competitiveness of the US is a further attempt to curb and suppress China's innovation and development, so as to maintain the global hegemony of the US.

Indeed, the BIS makes no bones about its remit, stating its role is to advance US national security, foreign policy and economic objectives by promoting continued US strategic technology leadership.

But by using export controls as "a tool of political repression and economic bullying", the US is not only hindering normal economic and trade cooperation between Chinese and US enterprises, it is also severely disrupting the global industrial and supply chains and damaging the international economic and trade orders and free-trade rules, as China's Ministry of Commerce has said.

In response to the US taking a wrecking ball to the international tech trade, the Investment Promotion Agency of the Chinese Ministry of Commerce is promoting closer cross-border cooperation in the semiconductor sector.

At a conference in October, the ministry proposed the founding of a Cross-Border Semiconductor Work Committee, which points to the right way to counter the US' tech chain vandalism, namely rallying more international collaboration in the chip industry to make the chains more resistant to being vitiated by the US. It is to be hoped that this initiative gains traction as the US needs to know that it cannot always get things its own way at the expense of others.