Top Beijing envoy to US criticises Biden’s moves targeting Chinese products over national security

Seeing e-vehicles as ‘iPhone on wheels’ or cargo cranes as ‘Trojan horses’ yields never-ending cycle and ‘excessive anxiety’, says Ambassador Xie Feng
Diplomat appears to reference US investigation into connected technology used in Chinese vehicles and actions meant to make American ports more secure

US-China relations

Robert Delaneyin Washington

Published: 12:47am, 15 Mar 2024

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China’s top envoy to the US criticised President Joe Biden’s recent moves targeting Chinese products on national security grounds, even as he acknowledged that the American leader’s recent summit with President Xi Jinping helped to stabilise the bilateral relationship.

Speaking at a conference hosted by Chinese state media outlets on Thursday, Ambassador Xie Feng appeared to reference an investigation into connected technology used in Chinese vehicles and actions aimed at reducing possible vulnerabilities tied to products from the country in American port infrastructure.

“Viewing e-vehicles as ‘iPhone[s] on wheels’ or describing cargo cranes as ‘Trojan horses’ only gets one into a never-ending cycle – overstretching national security leads to excessive anxiety,” Xie said, according to a report on the ambassador’s remarks published by his embassy.

“If ‘de-risking’ is all about China, it means lost opportunities and lose-lose outcomes,” it added. “After all, with over 70,000 American companies investing in China and the two economies so closely connected, a forced ‘decoupling’ can be too expensive.”

US government concerns about potential national security vulnerabilities embedded in Chinese products and investments in America have gathered momentum for years, prompting measures like a law in 2018 that strengthened the authorities of the Committee of Foreign Investment in the US, or CFIUS.

These measures continued under Biden’s watch, with ever-tightening restrictions on China’s access to advanced chips and chipmaking tools, prompted by concerns that Beijing could leverage them to develop military technologies.

The concerns reached a fever pitch this week with the closely watched House of Representatives passage of a bill that would force Chinese tech company ByteDance to divest its popular short-video sharing app TikTok to keep its service to US users intact.

Acting on alarms sounded by American officials and others in Washington that Beijing could remotely operate Chinese-manufactured cranes to disrupt the flow of goods and reveal information about US military shipments, Biden last month signed an executive order to mandate the reporting of cyber incidents.

US raises alarm as Chinese platform corners global shipping logistics market

Warnings about port vulnerabilities have included a report published last year by the Brookings Institution spotlighting the Chinese commercial logistics platform Logink, which collects information on shipping and cargo movement worldwide and provides tracking, data management and other services free of charge.

The Biden administration also plans to invest more than US$20 billion in American port infrastructure over the next five years, including an effort to onshore US crane manufacturing.

Logink, which describes itself as a “one-stop logistics information service platform”, began as a provincial programme in China in 2007. It became part of a regional network in northeast Asia in 2010 and a global platform after 2014.

Just days later, the US Commerce Department announced that its investigation into “connected” car technology developed by China could lead to the imposition of restrictions on these products.

On a more positive note, Xie praised the “successful” summit between Xi and Biden in California in November, stating that “the San Francisco vision” had “stabilised the bilateral relationship”.