When I asked Matt Sheehan, a global technology fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, how he feels about US-China relations ...
What’s the strategy—and real rationale—behind US restrictions on China?
...today, he said he’s “on edge” because “there’re a lot of decisions being made in rapid succession with hugely uncertain outcomes.”
One of these big decisions is the Biden administration’s escalation of restrictions on chip exports to China.
While people are still trying to understand the policy in real time, it has become clear that the administration’s moves are not just a matter of adding ...
...more Chinese companies or more chip technologies to a list of targets, but a change in the US government’s mindset when it comes to containing China.
For a long time, the main question on Chinese export control was whether to “do as much damage as you can today versus to preserve your leverage on a longer time scale,” said Sheehan.
But that’s going to change, according to Sheehan: “I think this latest control kind of firmly settles that debate within [Washington] DC on the ...
...side of doing damage today. People decided that leverage is eroding naturally over time anyway, and we have to use this leverage while we can.”
Are they really based on addressing human rights concerns, as often claimed, or are they merely more political games?
Yangyang Cheng, a fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, noted in the panel that the policies are “logically inconsistent and morally indefensible” if the reasoning ...
...“is not because building weapons is bad or building different types of surveillance systems is bad, but because I want to build better weapons and better surveillance systems.”