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Why Blacklisting Huawei Could Backfire

Foreign Affairs

June 19, 2019

CSET’s Lorand Laskai explains in Foreign Affairs how U.S. restrictions on Chinese technology, including the products of Huawei, could wind up spurring on China’s efforts at self-reliance in innovation.

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In 2018, the Commerce Department proposed categories of “emerging technology” for export controls. “The problem is that these categories are exceptionally broad, denoting large buckets of technologies that are often layered into a diverse set of applications, most with no relevance to national security,” says CSET’s Lorand Laskai.

“We should be clear-eyed about what is going on in China, especially with regard to human rights abuses, but we should not be hysterical about the level of security threat that China poses,” said Helen Toner, CSET's director of strategy. “If the U.S. can act wisely and place its values front and center, it’s likely we can reach a new equilibrium that serves our interests. Fear and hype tend to damage the U.S. rather than serve it.”

Lorand Laskai, Visiting Researcher at CSET, and co-author Ashley Feng of the Center for a New American Security explore how U.S.-China economic and technological decoupling are taking place in a number of ways.

See our translation of a tech transfer plan, which briefly addresses China's system for acquiring foreign technology, but the bulk of the document deals with transfers of technology within China, such as finding practical, commercially viable applications of new discoveries and putting technological advancements to work in rural areas and economically disadvantaged regions.