U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has arrived in China for a four-day visit and held a meeting with China's Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao. She is the fourth senior U.S. official to visit China in recent months in an effort to stop tensions from boiling over. Raimondo was met at the airport by Lin Feng, Director of the Ministry of Commerce’s American and Oceania Affairs Department, and U.S. Ambassador to China Nick Burns. She was expected to raise a range of issues, including market access, raids on U.S. consultancy firms, China’s ban on the sale of products from memory chip firm Micron Technology, data security and China’s anti-espionage law.
China is demanding relaxation of U.S. controls on the sale of chips, software and equipment to China’s semiconductor industry. At the BRICS summit in South Africa last week, Minister Wang Wentao delivered a prepared statement from President Xi Jinping at a business forum criticizing the U.S. for its tendency toward “hegemony”. The speech called for the world to avoid “the abyss of a new cold war”, and blamed “one country” that is “obsessed with maintaining hegemony and has gone out of its way to cripple emerging markets and developing countries”. Chinese Ministry of Commerce Spokeswoman Shu Jueting said that Beijing would “declare its position” on certain “imminent” trade issues during Raimondo’s visit.
Secretary Raimondo said stable relations between the U.S. and China are “profoundly important”. “The economic relationship between the United States and China is one of the most significant in the world. We share over USD700 billion of trade,” Raimondo said in the Chinese capital. “It is profoundly important that we have a stable economic relationship, which is to the benefit of both of our countries, and in fact what the world expects of us. It’s a complicated relationship. We will of course disagree on certain issues, but I believe that we can make progress if we are direct, open and practical,” she added.
Before Secretary Raimondo arrived in China, the U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) announced that it will lift 27 Chinese entities out of the so-called "Unverified List" which restricts the entities to access exports from the U.S. Experts interpret this decision as a positive signal, indicating Washington's interest in engaging with China and finding solutions to existing trade problems between the two countries. In February, 2022, the U.S. Commerce Department added 33 entities in China to its unverified list (UVL), saying that it was “unable to establish the legitimacy of the entities and how export items would be used by them”. The 27 were now removed from the list following end-user checks.
