The U.S. government has approved about 69.9% of some 40,000 export license applications involving China in the 2022 fiscal year, according to written testimony ahead of a hearing before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee Tuesday. “I want to be clear that even as we pursue actions that protect U.S. national security and foreign policy interests, we are not interested in decoupling our economy from the PRC,”
The document cited Alan F. Estevez, Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security as saying, in his report on the work of the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS). [UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE Under ...- house.gov]
In his report, Estevez did not give examples of approved applications, but said “the world’s two biggest economies should continue to engage in legitimate commercial trade that does not impact U.S. national security or foreign policy interests.”
However, the strategic challenge continues. The United States is discussing imposing new sanctions on China if it provides military support to Russia, Reuters reported. Washington has already floated the idea with G7 allies, days after it warned that Beijing was considering sending weapons to Moscow — an allegation China denied. Beijing has been preparing for such a threat: Soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine a year ago, China carried out a domestic “stress test” to see how it would be affected by similarly sweeping sanctions to those imposed on Moscow. And as the former French treasury official Agathe Demarais notes in her new book on how U.S. sanctions can backfire, China has for years been quietly readying its financial system for such measures.
