Trump administration goes after DJI, SMIC

Donald Trump’s Commerce Department has added a large number of Chinese companies to the entities list, reports Reuters, meaning US companies can no longer export to them without explicit permission.

The biggest names added to the list has been drone company DJI and China’s top chipmaker, SMIC.

DJI was accused of “enabled wide-scale human rights abuses within China through abusive genetic collection and analysis or high-technology surveillance,” saying China used “ubiquitous surveillance to repress its citizens in Xinjiang and elsewhere.”

They also accused DJI and others of  “facilitated the export of items by China that aid repressive regimes around the world, contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests.”

A similar ban on Huawei’s smartphones and network technology has dealt a near killing blow to the smartphone company outside China, with both hardware such as processors, software such as the Android OS and intellectual property being banned from sale to the company. Huawei recently sold off its low-cost Honor brand due to this.

Huawei had been hoping to power its smartphones with chips fabbed by processor company SMIC, but that company is now itself in a similar position, with the company likely unable to license designs for ARM’s latest generation processors.

It is unclear if the coming change of administration in the USA will change the USA’s approach to China, which is increasingly resembling a new Cold War.

via XDA-Dev