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U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Wednesday that the U.S. should avoid decoupling entirely from China, and focus instead on limiting Beijing’s access to key technology such as advanced AI equipment.
“We don’t want to delink ourselves economically,” Raimondo said at the Semafor World Economy Summit in Washington. “That would be a bad thing ... even from China.”
“If stuff is readily available around the world, I don’t want to prevent U.S. companies from selling that to China,” she said, noting that U.S. companies continue to sell billions of dollars worth of semiconductors to China.
In key sectors, however, Raimondo stressed the need to cut off China’s supply. “If it’s our crown jewels, our most sophisticated AI, most sophisticated chips, most sophisticated chip equipment? No, that is national security. I don’t care how much revenue you have to give up, you’re not allowed to sell that to China.”
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Under Raimondo’s leadership, the Commerce Department has launched extensive export controls on U.S. chips and advanced semiconductors, an approach National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has described as ”a small yard and a high fence.”
Raimondo’s comments come at a moment of relative thawing between the Biden administration and Xi Jinping’s China. ”The China-U.S. relationship is beginning to stabilize,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a readout summarizing a conversation between the two leaders in early April. The U.S. and Chinese defense chiefs had their first substantive talks in almost 18 months on Tuesday, and talks on AI are expected in the coming weeks.
