Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, on Nov. 4 urged the Commerce Department to enforce existing export controls meant to prevent key Chinese communist regime-tied companies such as Huawei and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) from obtaining advanced technologies for national security reasons.
He warned that the U.S. government has assumed that Chinese companies would abide by the export control laws rather than find workarounds, and evidence suggests this has allowed companies tied to the Chinese military to “leapfrog” the United States in areas of technological advancement.
“There is a growing bipartisan frustration that BIS refuses to act on fact-based reports that detail Huawei’s efforts to evade and undermine U.S. export controls,” McCaul wrote to the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) Under Secretary Alan Estevez….