Huawei, SMIC suppliers received billions worth of licenses for U.S. goods
WASHINGTON — Suppliers to Chinese telecoms giant Huawei and
China’s top chipmaker SMIC got billions of dollars worth of licenses from
November through April to sell them goods and technology despite their being on
a U.S. trade blacklist, documents seen by Reuters showed on Thursday.
According to the documents, 113 export licenses worth $61
billion were approved for suppliers to ship products to Huawei while another
188 licenses valued at nearly $42 billion were greenlighted for Semiconductor
Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC).
The data also showed that more than 9 out of 10 license
applications were granted to SMIC suppliers while 69% of requests to ship to
Huawei were approved over the same period.
The U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs committee
on Thursday voted to grant a request by its top Republican member Michael
McCaul to release the licensing data, which it received from the Commerce
Department in May.
House Republicans on the committee provided the documents to
Reuters following the authorization, at Reuters request. The documents are
expected to be posted publicly soon.
The numbers could enrage China hawks in Washington, who have
made a concerted effort to deprive Chinese companies of access to advanced U.S.
technology.
“It’s clearly in our national interest to increase
transparency and public scrutiny on how our nation transfers its technology to
an adversary,” McCaul said in a statement.
Republican senator Marco Rubio told Reuters he thinks
President Joe Biden needs to explain why the companies have continued to
receive “waivers.”
“It is just another example of President Biden not taking
the economic and security threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party
seriously,” he said.
The Commerce Department said in a statement that the release
of an arbitrary snapshot of license approvals “risks politicizing the licensing
process and misrepresenting the national security determinations” made by the
government.
It also stressed that approved license applications do not
represent actual shipments and around half of all licenses are used. It added
that license applications involving Huawei and SMIC are processed under
policies developed by the Trump administration and maintained by the Biden
administration.
Huawei declined to comment, while SMIC did not respond to a
request for comment.
Huawei was placed on a trade blacklist in May 2019 over
national security concerns, forcing its U.S. suppliers and others to obtain a
special license to ship goods to it. SMIC was added to the so-called entity
list in December 2020, over fears it could divert advanced technology to
military users.
A majority of the licenses granted did not authorize
shipments of sensitive items. Of the 113 licenses approved for Huawei during
the period, 80 were for non-sensitive items that only required a license
because the recipient was blacklisted. For SMIC, the figure was 121 of 188.
Licenses are generally good for four years.
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