The claim: During Tuesday night's debate, Vice President Kamala Harris accused former President Donald Trump of “selling us out” to the Chinese government with policies that “ended up selling American semiconductors to China.”
Verdict: False. The Trump administration has blocked Chinese investors from buying U.S. semiconductor manufacturers, restricted exports to top Chinese chipmakers, and significantly restricted sales to China and to third countries that do business with Chinese companies it considers to be national security threats, such as the telecommunications company Huawei. President Joe Biden's administration, under which Harris serves, has reportedly begun approving third-party suppliers to sell chips to Huawei in 2021.
During the first presidential debate between President Trump and Vice President Harris, VP Harris responded to a question about Biden's decision to maintain some Trump-era tariffs on China by attacking Trump's China policy more generally.
“He's created a trade war. You want to talk about making a deal with China?,” Harris said. “After all, under President Donald Trump, he's ended up selling American semiconductors to China and helping China upgrade and modernize its military. Fundamentally, China policy should be about making sure America wins the 21st century race, and he's failed us.”
Harris attributed the victory to a “focus on our relationships with our allies,” in addition to other issues such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
Trump said that because of left-wing policies, “they [China] “They buy chips from Taiwan. We barely make any chips anymore because of their philosophies and policies,” he said, continuing to assert that Harris personally “has no policy.”
The Trump administration has faced significant criticism from both the left and the libertarian right, and has imposed significant restrictions on trade with China, particularly in the areas of chip manufacturing and semiconductors. In 2017, the Trump administration blocked a Chinese investor from acquiring the American semiconductor company Lattice Semiconductor.
“As China has moved into semiconductor manufacturing and design, Chinese investors have been buying up overseas chipmakers and partnering with Western technology giants. The Lattice Semiconductor deal fulfills those ambitions,” he said. The New York Times Reported at that time.
In 2020, toward the end of Trump's term, his administration Blocked U.S. companies were barred from several key exports to China's largest semiconductor manufacturer, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. The Commerce Department argued that sales to SMIC “may pose an unacceptable risk of diversion to military end uses in the People's Republic of China,” and the restrictions are specifically intended to prevent U.S. technology from being “sold out” to China, as Harris denounced during the debate.
The policy of restricting China's access to U.S. technology has not been without political costs for the Trump administration. As Chad Vaughn of the Peterson Institute for International Economics explained in a 2020 column criticizing Trump, the president began cracking down on sales of semiconductors and other critical chip technologies in response to what he saw as a de facto national security threat at a time when “export sales were booming despite the pandemic and anti-China rhetoric in the U.S. election campaign.”
“The Trump Administration is reforming the US export control regime, which could lead to significant cuts in overseas sales for these two US industries. Elements of the new regime are likely well-thought-out attempts to mitigate legitimate national security risks,” the think tank said. I expressed my opinion. “Other ties to national security are weaker at best and will undoubtedly result in substantial economic damage to American companies.”
Boeun expressed particular concern that the Trump administration has gone beyond restricting direct sales to China.
The administration's latest restrictions go beyond blocking technology exports to China. The policy also restricts some U.S. sales to third countries, even those countries are U.S. military allies. U.S. semiconductor tool makers can't sell their equipment to major semiconductor manufacturers in South Korea or Taiwan, for example, if companies in those countries want to use U.S. tools to make products for sale to Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company that the administration has targeted as a national security threat.
The Biden administration began to reverse this policy trend in 2021. In August of that year, Reuters reported, citing “people familiar with the process,” that the Biden administration had “given suppliers permission to sell chips for auto parts, such as video screens and sensors, to Huawei.”
More recently, in April, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) Sent Following Huawei's announcement of the debut of a computer model using technology made by Intel Corp., a letter was sent to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo seeking clarification on content suggesting the Biden administration has approved the sale of Intel technology to a company widely viewed as a global security threat.
