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Tech control disappointing
2006-07-12
China Daily
Despite its ostensible effort to facilitate high-tech trade between China and the United States, the US Government's latest move indicated that Washington wishes to guard the country's technology exports to China as tightly as ever.
Unless the Pentagon, which is behind these restrictions, stops its fantasies about China's military build-up, Chinese and US companies involved in bilateral high-tech trade may still have a hard time ahead of them. For the same reason, a sector with the potential to help iron out imbalances in bilateral trade is unable to perform its due function.
The US Department of Commerce last week released a new version of rules for the control of technology exports to China.
These disappointing rules came just three months after the establishment of a working group under the Sino-US Joint Commission for Commerce and Trade, a body meant to facilitate high-tech trade.
According to the new rules, methods different from the old ones would be introduced. But the aim of the rules is the same to limit the transfer of technology the US authorities suspect could fall in the hands of China's armed forces.
Like the old rules, the new ones are expected to kill business deals or considerably lower efficiency by prolonging the investigative processes. That will penalize Chinese and US high-tech firms.
US officials explicitly linked the rules to China's rapidly growing spending on military modernization and to what they believe is the opaque nature of China's intentions in developing its armed forces.
Linking China's military expenditure to worries about US technologies' final destination is a far-fetched, logically unsound approach in terms of trade policy decision-making.
Again, the so-called security concerns prevailed just as in the contentious CNOOC-Unocal case, a pure business deal shot down last year over concerns about US "economic security."
US politicians have criticized China over issues such as unsatisfactory IPR protection, which could contribute to the trade imbalance in favour of China. But they should know that the US trade deficit is also a result of political barriers they erect for business deals which should be free from political concerns.
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