US adds 80 firms including from Pakistan to export blacklist
Listen to article
The United States has added 80 companies from various countries, including Pakistan, to its export blacklist.
The US added six subsidiaries of Inspur Group, China's leading cloud computing and big data service provider, and dozens of other Chinese entities to its export restriction list on Tuesday.
The Inspur units were listed for contributing to the development of supercomputers for the Chinese military, the Commerce Department said in a posting. Five of the subsidiaries are based in China and one in Taiwan. Inspur Group itself was placed on the list in 2023.
The Inspur units are among about 80 companies and institutes added to the export control list on Tuesday. Over 50 are based in China. Others are in Taiwan, Iran, Pakistan, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.
The listings are intended to restrict China's ability to develop high-performance computing capabilities, quantum technologies and advanced AI, and impede China's development of its hypersonic weapons program.
"We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives," said Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
China's foreign ministry, in response to an enquiry on Wednesday, condemned the US move and said the country will take necessary measures to safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises.
The Chinese embassy in Washington said on Tuesday it firmly opposed "these acts taken by the US and demand that it immediately stop using military-related issues as pretexts to politicize, instrumentalize and weaponize trade and tech issues."
The Inspur Group did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The US also seeks to disrupt Iran's procurement of drones and related defense items and to prevent development of its ballistic missile program and unsafeguarded nuclear activities.
The government adds companies to the Commerce Department's Entity List for national security or foreign policy concerns. Companies cannot sell goods to those listed without applying for and obtaining licenses, which are likely to be denied.
Commerce official Jeffrey Kessler said the administration aims to prevent "US technologies and goods from being misused for high performance computing, hypersonic missiles, military aircraft training, and UAVs (drones) that threaten our national security."
When Inspur Group was placed on the list in 2023, executives from AMD (AMD.O), opens new tab and Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab were questioned about their dealings with the company. At the time, chip industry insiders and their advisers said firms were trying to assess whether they had to halt supplying Inspur's subsidiaries.
Reuters could not immediately determine whether the US companies continued to do business with the subsidiaries. Nvidia declined to comment, and AMD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Chinese firms Nettrix Information Industry Co, Suma Technology Co and Suma-USI Electronics are among the other companies added to the list. The US said they were added for helping develop Chinese exascale supercomputers, which can process vast amounts of data at very high speeds and conduct large-scale simulations.
The companies have also provided manufacturing capabilities to Sugon, also known as Dawning Information Industry Co (603019.SS), opens new tab, a computer server manufacturer added to the Entity List in 2019 for building supercomputers used by the military, the Commerce Department said.
The companies could not immediately be reached for comment.
Other companies were added to the list for acquiring US origin items to advance China's quantum technology capabilities, and for selling products to companies that supply other listed parties, including Huawei, the tech conglomerate viewed as at the center of China's AI ambitions.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Express Tribune
2 hours ago
- Express Tribune
Migration crisis: what really matters?
Listen to article When President Donald Trump signed an executive order back in January banning refugee resettlement, citing national security and the need to "protect the homeland", it wasn't just a policy shift but a declaration of how the modern world views displacement. Refugees are increasingly seen not as victims of circumstance, but as potential threats, burdens or political pawns. The tough reality that emerges with increasingly strong borders and inflammatory people-powered politics is: in the world at large, is it borders or bodies that weigh more? The United States, long a symbol of refuge, has been retreating from its commitments. Under Trump's previous administration, the refugee cap reached historic lows, and entire populations were blocked entry on the basis of religion and nationality. Now, the familiar language of fear is back, cloaked in sovereignty, but rooted in exclusion. And this is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Across Europe, the narrative echoes. The UK's attempts to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, Italy's criminalisation of migrant rescue ships and Greece's illegal pushbacks in the Aegean all signal a global trend: the securitisation of human movement. Refugees are treated less like people in need and more like liabilities to be managed, repelled or offloaded. But in today's world, the category of the "refugee" itself is expanding — or at least, should be. While the 1951 Geneva Convention defines a refugee as someone fleeing persecution due to race, religion, nationality or political opinion, this framework fails to accommodate the new and growing class of displaced persons: climate migrants. Many people are made homeless each year by floods, droughts, fires and flooding waters. Entire nations on islands are in peril and at the same time, changing weather in South Asia and Africa leads to conflicts and destroys people's livelihoods. These people do not receive the same status as refugees, according to international rules. No one is protecting them and there is no form of recognition set aside for them. This lack of rules further highlights a weakness in how the world is run. The rules in war do not update as the world shifts. Refugee institutions made after World War II do not keep up with the issues caused by today's displacement. Although the Geneva Convention is admired, it no longer works well. It cannot address the blurred lines between conflict and climate, between persecution and poverty, between war and weather. As a result, these grey zones are overlooked by the international community as rich nations stop accepting refugees but claim to follow humanitarian principles. This raises a fundamental moral dilemma: What are borders actually protecting? If the answer is sovereignty, then sovereignty itself becomes a justification for indifference. Hannah Arendt once warned of the danger faced by those who lose the "right to have rights". Today, millions roam the world with no state to speak for them, no law to defend them and no border willing to welcome them. Their existence is a daily negotiation with rejection. The debate is not just about who crosses borders; it's about how the global order prioritises state security over human security; it's about whether IR will keep being just about power or if it will become something fairer and more open. We can no longer afford to treat migration as a temporary crisis or a political inconvenience. Climate displacement, economic collapse and civil conflict are not going away; they are the future. And that future demands new definitions, new protections and, above all, new compassion. If we continue to worship borders and ignore the bodies knocking on them, then we must also accept what that reveals about our values. If the world is set up to protect the few at the expense of the disadvantaged, it will not be a true just society. And in the end, the lines we draw on maps will mean little if they come at the cost of our shared humanity.
Express Tribune
5 hours ago
- Express Tribune
Twilight of the Empire
US President Donald Trump gestures, as he departs for Pennsylvania, on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, U.S., May 30, 2025. Photo: Reuters Listen to article As a series of trends and shocks cumulatively strain the old order, US President Donald Trump, even his critics must admit, possesses the fatal gift of locating the aching pulse of the nation, only to inflame it further with self-destructive measures while eroding Washington's global credibility. He sees the symptoms of American decline clearly: deindustrialisation, a brittle middle class, bloated trade deficits, and the political cost of endless wars. But he metabolises crisis into spectacle, grievance into doctrine, and interdependence into betrayal. For decades, the US has functioned as the imperial core of a global capital-recycling apparatus. The system has depended on the continuous inflow of surplus capital from export-heavy economies, including China and Germany, to America's debt-saturated financial architecture. The US trade deficit reached an eye-watering $1.1 trillion in 2023, a figure that dwarfs those of other peripheral or semi-peripheral economies like India. In this light, Trump's populist howl against the 'indignity' of the American people, dispossessed in the very belly of global wealth, is not entirely misplaced. His instinct that endless wars serve as spectacles to obscure the real mechanism of American hegemony – the global dollar-debt regime – is accurate in a crude, pre-theoretical sense. Since the late 1960s, when America ceased being a surplus nation, its geopolitical muscle has rested not on production but on its control of the dollar as the global reserve currency. The military-industrial complex is merely the theatrical wing of a deeper financial imperialism. However, Trump is radically mistaken in his belief that punitive tariffs and protectionist swagger will resurrect 'Middle America.' Tariffs, in the late neoliberal stage, cannot revive industrial capacity gutted by decades of offshoring and rentier capitalism. Instead, they risk destabilising the very mechanism whereby America's status as a debtor empire is transformed into an asset: the recycling of dollar-denominated debt into US capital markets. If that circuit is broken, the paper wealth of Wall Street and the speculative empires of Trump's own class will collapse. To materially uplift the working and lower-middle classes that fuelled his electoral resurgence, Trump would have to declare war not on China or Brussels, but on Manhattan and Malibu, hedge funds, private equity, and speculative real estate. 'Asymmetric interdependence' For much of the post-World War II period, what was marketed as 'globalisation' was, in fact, an imperial project cloaked in liberal universals. It was the projection of American state-capitalist hegemony through a scaffold of multilateral institutions – the IMF, World Bank, WTO, NATO – and the sacrosanct status of the dollar as the planetary currency-signifier. These were not neutral frameworks but instruments of asymmetric interdependence: the United States exported capital, debt, and ideology, while importing dependence, discipline, and surplus labour from the periphery and semi-periphery. The so-called "Washington Consensus" was never a consensus but a diktat. The system also functioned through a deeper ideological fantasy that free markets and global rule-based order were apolitical, universal, and benign. However, even most liberal-internationalist critiques warn the fantasy is fraying. The very interdependence that sustained US primacy is in retreat. Firms and governments worldwide need American consumers, capital markets, and alliances, giving Washington soft coercive power. Trump's tactics have upended that balance. By 'assailing interdependence,' the administration is chipping away at the very basis of American advantage. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye argue that order depends on stable power balances, shared norms, and sustaining institutions. Trump has shaken all three. What follows is a deeper drift into disorder, one that won't resolve until Washington either reorients itself or is overtaken by a new dispensation. The plunge may already be underway. 'In his erratic and misguided effort to make the United States even more powerful, Trump may bring its period of dominance—what the American publisher Henry Luce first called 'the American century'—to an unceremonious end,' they write in a Foreign Affairs essay. The weaponisation of the global economy hollows out the very symbolic order the US once used to legitimate its rule. By shrinking its adversaries' strategic space, Washington also corrodes the interconnected lattice that once lent credibility and allure to its empire. A tariff here, a blacklist there, and the freezing of foreign bank reserves – each may win tactical advantage, but at the cost of eroding the trust that underpinned the liberal international order. After all, what merchant or government would dare anchor long-term plans to a system where every node can be severed by a presidential signature? Trump's disruption is risky for the US precisely because new economic blocs are emerging from the wreckage of Western hegemony. Many leaders of the Global South remember colonialism and feel the 21st century liberates them from Western diktats. Where the US once posed as the sole path to progress, China's tech power and Russia's security reach now appear less like threats and more like counterweights. On soft power's front, when natural disasters strike or epidemics spread, Western-style NGOs and media have lost some of their framing power, as Chinese and Russian aid convoys now appear on television alongside those from the Red Cross. The velvet-glove diplomacy of the Cold War years – teddy bears over bombers – has been largely replaced by quarantine diplomacy, vaccine pledges, and once-dominant American development agencies playing second fiddle to Belt-and-Road contracts. In May, a major Democracy Perception Index reported that majorities of people worldwide now see the US negatively. The pollster noted that after Trump's return to the White House, America's reputation 'took a particularly massive hit in EU countries' and fell sharply everywhere. Even NATO founder Anders Fogh Rasmussen sighed that the US' standing was 'unloved' across most of the world. By contrast, China's image is improving globally, even overtaking the US in overall favourability in most regions. At home, the US is cannibalising its future. Budget cuts to core research agencies like the NSF and NIH are hollowing out the very ecosystem that once drove American innovation. Labs shrink, fellowships vanish, and global talent turns to Beijing, Singapore, or the UAE – where funding flows and visas follow. Meanwhile, China invests aggressively in semiconductors, AI, and green tech, eroding the US edge. As Oxford's Carl Benedikt Frey puts it, Trump's agenda risks dismantling the pillars of US innovation. Technological leadership is not a birthright but is built. And Washington is letting it rot. Trump's move to turn tariff-penalties and export bans into blunt instruments has worried many that he was abandoning existing rules and undermining the soft power that Washington has spent decades building. Analysts argue that American power rests on a blend of hard force and attraction, even though this very soft power has enabled hard power interventions. Interdependence with trading partners and multilateral institutions generates US leverage, while global admiration for 'American culture and ideals' makes allies pliant, they argue. Trump's assault on trade pacts and international agencies undercuts the foundation of American power and accelerates the erosion of the postwar order. In principle, if American power were absolute, it could force partners into line indefinitely. In practice, aggressive trade measures are sowing resentments. Many countries have been party to US-led trade deals expecting mutual benefit – now they wonder if Washington will simply upend their exports to punish political stances. The WTO and other legal venues, for a long time arenas where small states could begrudge larger ones, are being largely sidelined. Without clear enforcement, the most vulnerable economies will look for alternative blocs or simply bribe each other to stay out of the US orbit. The cruellest irony is that by inflicting pain on others – or threatening to – the US is undermining the very goodwill and partnerships that underpinned its postwar hegemony. The writer is a Lahore-based senior journalist
Business Recorder
8 hours ago
- Business Recorder
US Treasury's Bessent calls on China to be ‘reliable partner' in trade negotiations
WASHINGTON: US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday called on China to uphold its commitments under an initial US trade agreement reached in Geneva last month, hours after he and other US and Chinese officials agreed on a new framework to implement the deal. Bessent said in testimony before the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee that China has a 'singular opportunity' to stabilize its economy by shifting away from excess manufacturing production for export to greater domestic consumption. Trump touts 'done' deal with Beijing on rare earths, Chinese students 'But the country needs to be a reliable partner in trade negotiations,' Bessent said in prepared remarks. 'If China will course-correct by upholding its end of the initial trade agreement we outlined in Geneva last month, then a big, beautiful rebalancing of the world's two largest economies is possible.' Bessent's testimony did not provide details of the framework agreed with China late on Tuesday after two days of negotiations in London. Bessent departed the talks early to return to Washington for the House hearing.
