Senator Says US Needs to De-risk, Not Decouple From China
Udumbara
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said during a May 30 panel that the United States is so interconnected with China that the two economies cannot decouple. Rather, Washington should de-risk from the foreign adversary that is competing in space, AI, and other strategic sectors in a daily race to promote its form of governance.
“You don’t decouple, you can’t decouple. We’re interconnected. But you have to, number one, work toward a fair trade agreement.”
Rounds expressed support for continuing U.S. export controls on advanced technologies to communist China, namely, to restrict selling the newest chips or technologies, while continuing to do business and selling older models.
“I don’t want to force them to create their own advantages, while at the same time, I don’t want to lose the ability to market those items that are not the highest in terms of technological capabilities but still a very good market for us,” Rounds said. “So, that’s a fine line between those most advanced capabilities versus the run-of-the-mill capabilities.”
Rounds said that “we’ve done the best we could” with export controls, but “China is very good at cheating.”
U.S. lawmakers and officials have repeatedly raised concerns of Chinese companies circumventing U.S. export controls to gain access to restricted technologies through methods including smuggling.
“They will go to other countries. We think the product is being delivered one place, we will go in and make sure systems are set up, but as soon as our inspectors are gone, that stuff is out and it’s on its way back out to someplace in China,” he said.
Rounds defended the use of export controls, saying it delays China’s advancement to some degree.
“They’re going to get a hold of it at some stage of the game. We just have to delay the capabilities of them getting a hold of the highest and best-use chips as long as possible,” he said. “If we simply restrict and say, ‘We’re not going to provide you any compute power,’ then they’re going to create their own capabilities.”
Rounds said the approach was “not perfect” but a “bigger risk” was cutting off China and seeing it develop its own and then proliferating that technology around the world.
He estimated the race in AI to be a close one that happens on a day-to-day basis, “because the rest of the world is recognizing how critical AI is to developing their countries as well.”
“I want U.S. companies to be able to trade in China,” Rounds said, but not at the risk of losing their intellectual property or becoming “a strategic partner that ends up hurting the United States.”
“That makes for interesting interactions that we have to be aware of.”
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