U.S. Export Controls Across Time: Knowledge, Technology, and China

Today export controls are all over the news. The so-called October rules regulating U.S. advanced semi-conductor chip exports to China represent a significant expansion of U.S. efforts to control the export of upstream advanced technology where the direct military applications remain unknowable. The U.S. sanctions and export control policy against Russia involve the most far-ranging and internationally coordinated export control regime since the end of the Cold War. If the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party get their way, export controls will become even more central to U.S. economic policy vis-à-vis China, and even more trade and research-collaboration restrictive. Not for the first time, U.S. export control policy is being called an act of economic war.