BEIJING — Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen criticized China’s treatment of U.S. companies during a meeting with businesspeople on Friday, including announced but unspecified controls on exports of gallium and germanium, metals used in making semiconductors and solar panels. That announcement jolted South Korea and other countries such as the U.S. that import from China.
Among them: North Carolina-based semiconductor firms Wolfspeed and Qorvo.
China, chips & US dispute: Wolfspeed, Triad-based Qorvo paying the price
U.S. and other foreign companies are uneasy about their status in China following raids on consulting firms, the expansion of a national security law and calls by Xi and other officials for greater self-sufficiency.
“I am communicating the concerns that I’ve heard from the U.S. business community — including China’s use of non-market tools like expanded subsidies for its state-owned enterprises and domestic firms, and barriers to market access for foreign firms,” Yellen said, according to a transcript released by her department.
Yellen again rejected suggestions Washington is trying to decouple, or separate the U.S. economy from China’s.
Businesspeople have warned the world’s two biggest economies might split into separate markets with incompatible products as Beijing and Washington tighten trade controls and tell companies to reduce reliance on each other. They say that will hurt economic growth and innovation.
″I have made clear that the United States does not seek a wholesale separation of our economies,” Yellen told the businesspeople. “A decoupling of the world’s two largest economies would be destabilizing for the global economy, and it would be virtually impossible to undertake.”
Yellen defended U.S. export curbs as “premised on straightforward national security considerations and not undertaken to gain economic advantage over China.”
