U.S. Blacklists Chinese Entities It Says Are Aiding Weapons Program

WASHINGTON—The Biden administration on Thursday barred U.S. companies from supplying Chinese entities it said were building supercomputers to help Beijing develop new weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear devices.

The action, which will block sales of advanced U.S. semiconductors among other products, represents a further toughening of U.S. technology trade restrictions amid an increasingly adversarial relationship with China.

The U.S. “will use the full extent of its authorities to prevent China from leveraging U.S. technologies to support these destabilizing military modernization efforts,” U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said in a written statement.

The Chinese embassy didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

“We expect China will react to this in some way,” said Paul Triolo, head of global technology policy at Eurasia Group, a political-risk consultancy. He described Thursday’s move as a further “weaponizing” of the U.S. supply chain in its growing competition with China.

Supercomputers are vital for the development of advanced weapons systems, including nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles.

Chinese supercomputer developers are at the heart of Beijing’s key technological objective of making the country’s first exascale computer, a next-generation machine capable of performing one quintillion—or a billion billion—calculations per second.

The Chinese companies and computing centers targeted Thursday were added to a so-called entities list that restricts the export, re-export and transfer of items to entities involved in activities contrary to the national-security or foreign-policy interests of the U.S.

The entities added were Tianjin Phytium Information Technology, Shanghai High-Performance Integrated Circuit Design Center, Sunway Microelectronics, the National Supercomputing Center Jinan, the National Supercomputing Center Shenzhen, the National Supercomputing Center Wuxi and the National Supercomputing Center Zhengzhou.

The Biden administration’s announcement builds on action by the Trump administration against Chinese supercomputing entities a couple of years ago. It could add to tensions with Beijing at the same time political pressure to get tough on China has grown in Congress.

Earlier this year the Biden administration also decided to allow a Trump-era rule aimed at combating Chinese tech threats to take effect, over objections from numerous U.S. businesses. That rule enabled the Commerce Department to ban technology-related business transactions that it determines pose a national-security threat, part of an effort to secure U.S. supply chains.

Photo: The National Supercomputing Center Jinan, here in 2018, is among the Chinese companies and computing centers targeted by the action.
PHOTO: ROMAN PILIPEY/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-blacklists-chinese-entities-it-says-are-aiding-weapons-program-11617899231?mod=tech_lead_pos10