The discovery last year of U.S. technology inside the infamous Chinese spy balloon which enabled the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to collect intelligence over the United States’ most sensitive strategic installations should have served to highlight the failure of U.S. controls on exports to the People’s Republic of China.

Already in 1998, Congress was warning that U.S. technologies were helping to arm the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Since then, the CCP has executed an unprecedented buildup of China’s nuclear and conventional forces. American technologies have served as a key modernization enabler in this effort.

From the export of supercomputers to develop China’s nuclear weapons to the nearly undefeatable hypersonic weapons designed to deliver them; from the liberal transfer of semiconductor manufacturing equipment to the sensors in China’s Great Undersea Wall that can detect U.S. submarines in the Taiwan Strait, U.S. technologies have been vital to China’s military advancement.

Despite mounting evidence — some of it classified — of exports being diverted for non-stated uses, U.S. officials charged with implementing export controls remain blind to the damage being inflicted on the country’s national security. China requests more militarily useful technology from the U.S. than any other country and yet, by approving more than nine out of ten transfer requests, these officials are seemingly bent on fulfilling Lenin’s prophecy that “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” In describing the trend for allowing exports of semiconductor manufacturing equipment and tools, Dylan Patel — the chief analyst at research firm SemiAnalysis — has argued that, “the U.S. is granting licenses like they’re candy.”

The primary danger in providing dual-use technologies to China emanates from its Military-Civil Fusion (MCF) strategy. Under Chinese law, the government can compel companies to divert imported technologies wherever the CCP desires. In essence, any technology transferred to China’s civil sector, including intellectual property derived in the course of business deals with U.S. companies, can be co-opted by military and state security apparatchiks.

Nor is the diversion of U.S.-made products being limited for domestic use. China has reportedly assisted other adversaries in circumventing sanctions by provisioning Iran, North Korea, Russia, and most recently Hamas, with controlled U.S. technology.

Further facilitating diversion is the bilateral U.S.-China end-use check (EUC) agreement dating from 2004. The U.S. has no means to verify the actual end-use of technologies transferred to China after time limits elapse. With other countries, U.S. export control officials can conduct post-shipment verifications with few restrictions, up to between five and nine years after an export. Unique to China, U.S. officials have only 180 days after an item is shipped to conduct any checks: after that China can do as they please with American technologies. Rather than dissuading diversion, the EUC is thus an open invitation for the practice.

…U.S. export control officials and their policies appear to be provisioning the PLA with the very capabilities that will give Chinese leaders the confidence to invade Taiwan tomorrow…

To take one example from my own experience while reviewing license applications at the Department of Defense: do exports of a product like controlled carbon fiber filament actually go to making golf club shafts and brake pads, as indicated on the end-use statements for certain transfer requests? Or, since the same material is used in the manufacture of nose cones for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), are they being diverted to the PLA for its ICBM program?

Or consider the thousands of controlled microelectronics approved for transfer under the understanding that their use is for telecommunications equipment. The same field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) and monolithic microwave integrated circuits, or MMICs, that are used in cell phones and wireless communication devices can also be used in advanced military radars and missiles. Have such components ended up in cell phone towers or anti-aircraft missiles that could be fired at U.S. pilots in some future conflict? Unlike with every other trading partner, the U.S. has no way to verify these disquieting questions with China.

Chinese entities have a long-standing record of diverting U.S. technologies. When U.S. export officials learn of these diversions, they add those firms or persons to the U.S. Entity List, which leads to certain export restrictions being imposed on them.

However, misplaced faith in this whack-a-mole approach fails to recognize the systemic nature of diversion under Chinese President Xi Jinping ’s MCF strategy. Business names, individuals, and addresses can be easily and quickly changed, or new businesses established, to maintain the flow of needed U.S. technologies. Yet each time they pronounce that additional Chinese persons have been added to the Entity List, export control officials extol their action as a badge of efficiency rather than acknowledging it was their failed policies that permitted exports to China in the first place.

Do these officials honestly believe the stated end-uses for these dual-use technologies coming from the same government that openly pillages U.S. technology through cyber and corporate espionage, and has misled the world on so many other issues: from blatant human rights violations of ethnic minorities to hindering an understanding of the coronavirus; from militarizing the South China Sea to most recently stating that the PLA surveillance balloon that loitered above a U.S. strategic missile site was an errant weather balloon?

Ironically, far from restricting key technologies, U.S. export control officials and their policies appear to be provisioning the PLA with the very capabilities that will give Chinese leaders the confidence to invade Taiwan tomorrow — or perhaps even fly a spy-balloon over the continental United States today.

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