Pentagon abuses power for suppression: China Daily editorial

The Pentagon's decision to add multiple Chinese companies — including e-commerce giant Alibaba, search engine Baidu and electric vehicle manufacturer BYD — to its updated Section 1260H list of alleged "Chinese military companies" is a groundless suppression of Chinese enterprises that severely harms their legitimate rights and interests.

The misleading designation mainly restricts Pentagon procurement and serves as a warning signal to investors and government agencies. The US administration is using the list to target China's technology companies by means of weaponized trade restrictions.

As a spokesperson for China's Ministry of Commerce said on Saturday in a statement on the US Department of Defense's decision, the US side has ignored the consensus reached during the meeting between the heads of state of the two countries in Beijing, disregarded the overall interests of bilateral economic and trade relations, continuously generalized the concept of "national security" and abused state power to unjustifiably suppress Chinese enterprises.

The Pentagon's list now extends far beyond enterprises traditionally associated with weapons production and increasingly encompasses sectors that sit at the center of the global digital economy and high-tech innovation.

In the eyes of the US administration, technologies once regarded as commercial — semiconductors, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, batteries, robotics and advanced manufacturing — have become strategic assets with military implications. The distinction between civilian and military technology is fading. This shines a light on the US administration's reliance on sanctions as a sop for the US' growing anxiety about the loss of its competitiveness in advanced technology.

The US administration's increasingly expansive use of "security" instruments targeting Chinese companies suggests a superpower grappling with the uncomfortable reality that the US' technological leadership can no longer be taken for granted. So the Pentagon's latest action can be interpreted as part of a broader strategy aimed at "decoupling" from China's supply chains and weakening its high-tech competitiveness.

In practice, the US move is forcing the formation of parallel technological systems. In doing so, it is seriously disrupting the international economic and trade order, undermining the stability of global industry and supply chains, and dramatically increasing the operating costs of the world economy and global trade.

The outcomes achieved by China and the US under mechanisms such as bilateral economic and trade consultations should also be understood and assessed within this broader context of the cumulative effect of the US administration's export controls, investment restrictions, entity listings and military-company designation.

The danger is that the US side is forcing China-US economic relations to become trapped in a self-reinforcing cycle. Washington always sees "security threats" and imposes restrictions. That leaves Beijing no choice but to take corresponding countermeasures.

China urges the US side to stop its wrong practices, revoke the relevant measures, return to the right track of building a constructive China-US relationship of strategic stability, and provide fair, just and nondiscriminatory treatment to Chinese companies, said the spokesperson for the Ministry of Commerce of China.

Otherwise, China will take resolute and strong countermeasures, and all consequences and responsibilities arising therefrom shall be borne by the US side, the spokesperson added.

Neither the trend of economic globalization nor the laws of the market will allow the US to use political force to impose parallel technological systems on the world without causing significant harm — both globally and to itself. The global economy remains deeply intertwined, and the technologies of the future depend on complex international supply chains that stretch from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen.

If the US president's first visit to China in nine years last month was intended to stabilize relations, the Pentagon's latest move does the opposite. While the Chinese side has made clear its willingness to steady bilateral ties through cooperation and exchanges, the US side seems intent on demonstrating its readiness to further embed what it sees as Sino-US strategic competition in commerce, technology and finance.

And once "national security" becomes the organizing principle of economic policy, every company risks becoming a soldier. The Pentagon's latest blacklist suggests that, in what it views as the emerging China-US competition, that future might have already arrived.