Beijing reacted with scorn to the Treasury Department’s designation Friday of 15 individuals and 10 entities for their alleged connections to human rights abuses in several countries. Treasury singled out Chinese tech firm SenseTime for developing facial recognition algorithms it said “can determine a target’s ethnicity, with a particular focus on identifying ethnic Uyghurs” in Xinjiang. Treasury’s action to block any business from being transacted with any of the named individuals or entities “seriously interferes in China’s internal affairs” and “gravely violates basic norms governing international relations,” said a Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Monday.

The National Retail Federation expects imports at major U,S. retail container ports will end 2021 with the largest volume and fastest growth on record despite supply chain disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, reported the association Wednesday. U.S. ports handled 2.21 million 20-foot-long cargo container equivalents in October, up 3.5% from September but down 0.2% from October 2020, for the first year-over-year decline since July 2020, it said. The decline ended a 14-month streak of year-over-year growth that began in August 2020, after stores initially closed by the pandemic reopened and retailers worked to meet demand, said NRF. “Even with the decline, October was still among the five busiest months on record.”

China will respond with “firm countermeasures” to the Biden administration’s decision not to send an official U.S. delegation to the Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games over alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang, said a Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Tuesday. The U.S. “has been fabricating the biggest lie of the century about so-called ‘genocide’ in Xinjiang, but it has long been debunked by facts,” said the spokesperson. “The U.S. should stop politicizing sports, and stop disrupting and undermining the Beijing Winter Olympics, lest it should affect bilateral dialogue and cooperation in important areas and international and regional issues.” Having U.S. diplomatic or official representation would treat the Beijing Olympics “as business as usual” amid China’s “egregious human rights abuses and atrocities in Xinjiang," White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told a media briefing Monday.

The Trump administration's Section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports caused "a lot of damage to American consumers and business," and "we are no better off" after the phase one trade deal with China, House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee Chairman Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., told reporters during a roundtable discussion Thursday. Though stopping short of arguing the tariffs should be rolled back en masse, he did say there should be an effort to "take them one by one and make some adjustments." Some Section 301 tariffs could be changed in a process that need not be "politically toxic," he said. "The mess that Biden inherited takes some time to sort out," said Blumenauer. Customs and Border Protection collected more than $113.55 billion in Section 301 tariffs on Chinese goods from U.S. importers through Nov. 17 since the first of the tariffs took effect in July 2018.

China blasted the SEC’s adoption of final rules under the 2020 Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act that authorize the agency to delist the stocks of Chinese companies whose auditors withhold materials from U.S. regulatory inspection. “We have a basic bargain in our securities regime,” said SEC Chair Gary Gensler Thursday. “If you want to issue public securities in the U.S., the firms that audit your books have to be subject to inspection.” A Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson called the SEC’s move “another step to hobble Chinese enterprises for political purposes and to suppress and contain China’s development.” The rules “will deprive American investors of the opportunity to invest in many of the world’s fastest growing companies,” he said Friday.

The U.S. “repeatedly stretched the national security concept and abused state power to hobble Chinese companies,” said a Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Thursday. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security said a day earlier it added 27 foreign organizations and individuals to its Entity List, including eight technology entities based in China, to prevent U.S. emerging technologies from being used for Beijing’s “quantum computing efforts that support military applications.” The BIS action “severely hurts the interests of Chinese companies, recklessly undermines the international trade order and free trade rules, and gravely threatens global industrial and supply chains,” said the ministry spokesperson. “China reserves the right to take necessary countermeasures,” he said. “We will firmly defend Chinese companies’ legitimate rights and interests with all necessary measures.”

U.S. importers sourced 10.5 million PC monitors to the U.S. in Q3, 4.3% fewer than in the 2020 quarter, reported the International Trade Commission’s DataWeb portal. The average Q3 entry was worth $190.20 in customs value, 37.6% costlier than a year earlier. Monitor shipments through 2021's first nine months increased 13.9% to 30.84 million units, worth an average value of $172.09, up 16.3% from January-September 2020. Year-over-year average cost increases from higher panel costs were much steeper in TV imports to the U.S. than in PC monitors for Q3 and 2021's first nine months (see 2111150002). TV imports for the year to date were down 10%, compared with the 13.9% increase in monitor shipments.

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission warned of a continuing security threat from Huawei but said U.S. sanctions are having an effect. In Q2, “Huawei reported a 38 percent year-on-year fall in revenue, the third straight quarter of decline,” said the annual report to Congress released Wednesday: “Huawei executives have attributed their troubles to U.S. sanctions, which restricted the company’s access to chips used in many of its phones.” Huawei and ZTE are gaining ground in Latin America, with China offering subsidies and government support for using technology from the two vendors, the commission said. “Huawei has already become a leader in the region’s mobile device market and is a top competitor to build out 5G infrastructure in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico,” it said: “By integrating Chinese technologies into the region’s digital infrastructure, China is setting the stage for building long-term commercial dependencies as the region’s market develops.” China can also shape 5G and other standards in the region. The panel said China is poised to make cloud computing gains in developing countries. “Chinese cloud computing companies have thrived in a protected home market and with few exceptions can operate freely in the United States while U.S. companies face barriers in China.”

Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Roger Wicker of Mississippi and seven other Republicans urged the Commerce Department Monday to beef up its enforcement of restrictions on U.S. exports to Huawei and other companies on the Bureau of Industry and Security’s entity list, citing what they consider insufficient implementation. Huawei has been on the entity list since May 2019 (see 1905210013). The House Foreign Affairs Committee revealed last month BIS approved $100 billion-plus worth of export licenses for shipments to Huawei and top Chinese chipmaker SMIC from Nov. 9, 2020, through April 20 (see 2110220019). Commerce’s “lax enforcement” of its Foreign Direct Product Rule “has the effect of incentivizing other tech-focused companies throughout the supply chain to jeopardize our country’s security by transacting with Entity List companies like Huawei,” the GOP senators wrote Secretary Gina Raimondo. “Unless BIS enforces this rule with the speed the situation necessitates, additional suppliers of sensitive technology will likely engage in unlawful trade practices with companies closely connected to adversarial governments.” The lawmakers encouraged Raimondo to act “to ensure that BIS is equipped to enforce the full arsenal of the Department’s export control regulations -- and meet the challenges posed by this precarious moment -- considering the harms to national security they are intended to prevent.” BIS didn’t comment.

China welcomes “healthy competition” with the U.S., “based on observing the basic norms governing international relations,” said a Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Friday, reacting to National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan's remarks that a top Biden administration goal is to “set the terms for an effective and healthy competition with China.” Beijing opposes “unfair competition where one's own rules are forced on other countries as international rules,” said the spokesperson. “We oppose unethical competition where ‘competition’ is cited as an excuse to restrict other countries' development and deprives them of their legitimate rights and interests.” President Joe Biden said before the U.N General Assembly in September that the U.S. isn't looking for conflict or a cold war with China, Sullivan told the Lowy Institute Thursday: The U.S. seeks “the capacity to work together with China where it’s in the common interests of our countries and in the interests of the world to do so,” whether on climate change, nuclear proliferation or “macroeconomic stability.” Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping plan a virtual summit Monday to "discuss ways to responsibly manage the competition" between the U.S. and China, said the White House Friday.