With just a few weeks left in office, US President Joe Biden has been wasting no time in desperately trying to check China's rise. In the latest such move on Monday, the US Defense Department added Tencent, a social media and gaming giant, and CATL, the world's largest battery maker, to a list of Chinese companies which Pentagon alleges work with the Chinese military.
The US administration has put 134 Chinese enterprises, including shipping giant COSCO and oil company China National Offshore Oil Corp, on the blacklist. Almost all the 140 companies included in the Entity List, a blacklist for export control announced by the US Commerce Department in December, are Chinese owned, including some Chinese-owned enterprises based in Japan, the Republic of Korea and Singapore.
On Dec 23, the US Trade Representative announced the launch of a Section 301 investigation into China's semiconductor industry, accusing it of causing harm to US trade and national security.
However, such reckless actions are not new. The Biden administration has been using "national security" as an excuse to wage an economic war against China. Its strategy of "vigorous competition" with China is simply another name for curtailing China's economic and technological rise by using all means possible.
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Using the same absurd logic, the Chinese government could easily blacklist many US companies for working closely with the Pentagon or claim they pose a national security threat. But I'm glad that the Chinese government has refused to stoop as low as the Biden administration.
It's another matter that Biden officials are shamelessly proud of their track record of torpedoing China's rise.
In an exclusive interview with The New York Times on Jan 4, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained how the Biden administration had ganged up with the United States' European allies against China. Though he did not elaborate, it became clear that the US played a role in halting the China-EU Comprehensive Agreement on Investment.
China and the European Union concluded the CAI negotiations in principle on Dec 30, 2020, about three weeks before Biden took office. The CAI, if ratified, would have opened up a huge market and created more investment opportunities for EU companies, according to European Commission trade officials who took part in the seven-year-long talks.
Undermining China's rise and reputation has been a key mission and obsession of senior US officials. During a trip to India this week, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan repeatedly mentioned China in a negative tone while delivering a speech at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, in a bid to drive a wedge between the two Asian neighbors. The latest signs of warming between the world's two most populous countries must have driven the Biden administration to spend sleepless nights.
The same is true for the warming relations between China and Japan, and China and the ROK. Blinken just concluded his visit to the two countries in what could be his last overseas trip as the US' top diplomat.
According to US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller, Blinken and Japanese leaders discussed the "PRC's dangerous and destabilizing behavior in the South China Sea" and both sides "reiterated the importance of maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait".
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There is no doubt that the US has been dictating its European and Asian allies for decades. And yet the US has added fuel to the fire — and is playing with fire — by, among other things, announcing more than $800 million in military aid and arms sales to Taiwan in late December — the 19th round of such sales and assistance during Biden's term in office.
One thing is clear: Compared with the US, China has far more interest in maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. Safe shipping in the South China Sea is far more important for China, the largest trading nation in the world, than any other country.
History will ultimately prove that the US' efforts to curtail China's rise are an exercise in futility. But for now, it's good that the saboteur Biden administration will soon be out of office.
The author is chief of China Daily EU Bureau based in Brussels.
