New US curbs on high-tech investment: China threatens countermeasures
Beijing calls a US draft rule restricting investment in Chinese high technology, now extending to biotech, discriminatory and says it reserves the right to respond.
Archive image · Photo: N509FZ / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
China has responded to planned tighter US rules on outbound investment. The Commerce Ministry in Beijing rejected the draft on Saturday and called it discriminatory, the state-run Global Times reported, according to The Hill. China would monitor developments and reserves the right to take corresponding countermeasures, without saying what they would be.
The US Treasury proposed on Thursday to expand its outbound investment security programme. It would further limit US investment in China, Russia and North Korea in hypersonic systems, quantum information technologies, high-performance computing, supercomputing and artificial intelligence, with biotechnology added as a new sector. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pushed for that addition, according to the department. A public comment period is planned before a final rule.
The US State Department also sanctioned five Chinese companies said to be linked to a former Google engineer who was convicted this year of stealing AI trade secrets. Beijing objected to those sanctions as well.