New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

by David E. Sanger

The administration’s third tactic was the most novel: an effort to cut China off from the American technologies it was using to fuel its military and intelligence services. In the Trump years, the Department of Justice had begun to aggressively investigate Chinese researchers and students in the United States, looking for signs that they were exploiting the openness of American universities to funnel technology to China. The Biden approach was more targeted: His Commerce Department began to draw up lists of products that would no longer be exported to Beijing—and to limit sensitive technologies, especially in communications, that China would be permitted to sell in the United States. To Biden and his aides, this recalibration was long overdue. The Chinese saw it differently: Xi would later label it “containment, encirclement, and suppression.”