China outbound investment rule to be completed by end of year — US official

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Wednesday she expects rules to implement U.S. outbound investment restrictions on China will be completed by the end of the year.

President Joe Biden in August issued an executive order authorizing the Treasury secretary to prohibit or restrict U.S. investments in Chinese entities in three sectors: semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum information technologies and certain artificial intelligence systems.

Raimondo said at a U.S. House hearing she expects Treasury to complete the rules by the end of 2024. Commerce is “helping them to figure out which pieces of AI should we be most worried about, which kinds of companies should we be most worried about?”

Biden’s order aims to prevent American money and expertise from helping China develop technologies that could support its military modernization. “We can’t let them have our money and know-how,” Raimondo said.

China has condemned the move, but some U.S. lawmakers have argued it has too many loopholes. Some U.S. officials have said the outbound investment rules should not be overly broad to avoid harming the U.S. economy. Others, including former Biden administration officials, have called the measure a good first step, but said that Congress should provide resources to expand it.

Raimondo said she is building a team and seeking $5 million to study the outbound investment industry. “When we talk about quantum, you know, what does that actually mean? We’re providing like the commercial, industrial, technological know-how to match up against Treasury’s financial know-how,” Raimondo said.

She said Commerce is working to track investments and may need to buy data sets or IT systems.

“The kinds of investments we’re talking about are not in public stock market companies — it’s private money, it’s hard to track candidly. So any data that we can get access to track these sorts of private investments by us and our allies is very important,” Raimondo said.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)