The US Administration renewed, as part of the ongoing work in countering the spread of China’s influence, the ban on the purchase and sale of Chinese securities by American investors. It refers to securities of Chinese companies which are in any way affiliated with China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

On 9 November 2021, Joe Biden signed an order to extend the US Presidential Executive Order dated 12 November, 2020. As a result of it, national emergency protocol against a number of Chinese companies will continue for one more year. The Pentagon is involved with establishing a blacklisting system for Chinese companies. Currently, the blacklist includes about 60 top Chinese high-tech companies (such as, Huawei, China Mobile, China Telecom, Hikvision, SMIC and others).

The White House issued a statement which led President Biden to believe that Beijing was increasingly exploiting United States capital to enable the modernization of China’s armed forces, intelligence services and other security agencies. Allegedly, China is developing its military-industrial complex through the forced transfer of so-called sensitive technologies from private-sector firms to PLA. According to the American side, such situations constitute an extraordinary threat to the U.S. national security, foreign policy and economy. Such technologies’ development allows China ‘to directly threaten the United States homeland and United States forces overseas’.

It is worth noting that Americans have criticized Beijing’s use of location tracking and facial recognition technologies to grossly violate human rights (certainly this relates to repressions against the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region and democratic rights activists from Hong Kong, as well as, repressive measures against dissidents in third countries). It is well known that for China this subject is particularly sensitive, and any mention of this sparks anger in Beijing.

I guess such actions of the White House are aimed at deterring US business, including investment companies and pension funds, from buying and selling shares of key Chinese corporations. The challenge is clear: the need to create problems for China’s economic and technological development. Washington has taken many systematic steps in this direction, but results of its work are not yet clear.