Politico reports:

After decades of U.S. efforts to engage China with the prospect of greater development through trade, the era of cooperation is coming to a screeching halt.

The White House and Congress are quietly reshaping the American economic relationship with the world’s second-largest economic power, enacting a strategy to limit China’s technological development that breaks with decades of federal policy and represents the most aggressive American action yet to curtail Beijing’s economic and military rise.

The new federal rules, executive orders and pending legislation aimed at China’s high-tech sectors, which began this fall and will continue in 2023, are the culmination of years of debate spanning three administrations. Taken together, they represent an escalation of former President Donald Trump’s tariffs and trade disputes against Beijing that could ultimately do more to slow Chinese technological and economic development — and divide the two economies — than anything the 45th president did while in office.

“You really have seen a sea change in the way that they’re looking at the relationship with China,” said Clete Willems, who helped design China economic policy in the Trump White House as Deputy Assistant to the President for International Economics and Deputy Director of the National Economic Council. “[The Biden] administration views Chinese indigenous innovation as a per se national security threat … and that is a big leap from where we’ve ever been before.”

The new strategy, which the Biden administration internally calls its “protect agenda,” is being rolled out this fall and winter in a series of executive actions. In October, the Commerce Department issued new rules aimed at cutting off Chinese firms’ ability to manufacture advanced computer chips. They will soon be followed by an executive order creating new federal authority to regulate U.S. investments in China — the first time the federal government will exert such power over American industry – and an executive order to limit the ability of Chinese apps like TikTok to collect data from Americans. [Continue reading…]