More stories

  • in

    Commerce Dept. Is on the Front Lines of China Policy

    The department has confronted the challenge of China by restricting key exports, a policy that is likely to continue in the Trump administration.The Commerce Department has traditionally focused on promoting the interests of American business and increasing U.S. exports abroad. But in recent years, it has taken on a national security role, working to defend the country by restricting exports of America’s most powerful computer chips.While the Trump administration is likely to remake much of the Biden administration’s economic policy, with a renewed focus on broad tariffs, it is unlikely to roll back the Commerce Department’s evolution.“I’m truthfully not terribly worried that the Trump administration will undo all the great work we’ve done,” Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, said in an interview. “Number one, it’s at its core national security, which I hope we can all agree on. But two, it is the direction that they were going in.”It was the first Trump administration that took the initial steps toward the Commerce Department’s evolution, Ms. Raimondo noted, with its decision to put the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei on the “entity list.” Companies on the list are deemed a national security concern, and transfers of technology to them are restricted.Ms. Raimondo came into the commerce job focused on confronting the challenge of China by building upon the Trump administration’s actions.She has overseen a significant expansion of U.S. economic and technology restrictions against China. The Biden administration transformed the tough but sometimes erratic actions the Trump administration had taken toward Beijing into more sweeping and systematic limits on shipping advanced technology to China.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Biden Targets China’s Chip Industry With Wider Trade Bans

    New rules prohibit the sale of certain types of chips and equipment to China, in an effort to close loopholes and cement the Biden administration’s legacy in countering the U.S. rival.The Biden administration announced on Monday broader restrictions on advanced technology that can be sent to China, in an effort to prevent the country from developing its own advanced chips for military equipment and artificial intelligence.The restrictions will prohibit the sales of certain types of chips and machinery to China, and will add more than 100 Chinese companies to a restricted trade list. The move marks the Biden administration’s third major update over the past three years to a set of rules that have tried to cut China off from the world’s most advanced technology.The rules are also likely to be the administration’s last on Chinese technology before President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inauguration next month, aiming to cement the Biden administration’s legacy in slowing down a rival country’s technological progress.Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told reporters in a call on Sunday that the move represented “the strongest controls ever enacted by the U.S. to degrade the P.R.C.’s ability to make the most advanced chips that they’re using in their military modernization,” referring to the People’s Republic of China. She said the government had worked closely with experts, industry and allied countries to ensure that “our actions protect national security while minimizing unintended commercial consequences.”National security officials have said that China’s ability to acquire and make advanced computer chips poses a threat to the United States. The chips are crucial for powering artificial intelligence and supercomputers that can be used to launch cyberattacks, design new weapons, erect surveillance systems and increase the military’s ability to respond accurately and rapidly to foreign attacks.In October 2022, the Biden administration issued its first sweeping restrictions on China, by banning sales of advanced A.I. chips and certain chip-making machinery to the country. In October 2023, the Biden administration built on those rules to capture more types of A.I. chips.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Biden Cuts Intel’s Chip Award

    The Silicon Valley company will receive less money from the CHIPS Act after winning a $3 billion military contract and changing some of its investment commitments.The Biden administration said Tuesday that it would award up to $7.86 billion in direct funding to Intel, with the U.S. chip giant set to receive at least $1 billion of that money before the end of the year.The money is a reduction from Intel’s preliminary award of $8.5 billion, which President Biden announced during a visit to the company’s Arizona plant in March. The Commerce Department said it had reduced Intel’s grant because the chip maker, the biggest recipient of money under the CHIPS Act, also received a $3 billion contract to make semiconductors domestically for the military.But the Commerce Department also detailed in a project document that Intel, which is under financial pressure because of a sales slump, had extended timelines for some projects beyond a 2030 government deadline.The company now plans to invest $90 billion in the United States by the end of the decade, after previously saying it would spend $100 billion over the next five years. It also reduced the estimated jobs it would create in Ohio, where it will require 3,500 fewer employees than the 10,000 it previously estimated, the Commerce Department said.Commerce and Intel officials said those changes weren’t a factor in the final award.Intel’s shifting timeline and jobs projections speak to the challenges the Biden administration has run into as it tries to rev up domestic chip-making. The CHIPS Act, a bipartisan bill passed in 2022, provided $39 billion to subsidize the construction of facilities to help the United States reduce its reliance on foreign production of the tiny, critical electronics that power everything from dishwashers to iPads.Nailing down its CHIPS award has been a priority for Intel, which last month reported the biggest quarterly loss in the company’s 56-year history. It has been cutting costs and fending off takeover interest from rivals, after the total value of the company fell to around $107 billion, from $500 billion in 2000. (Other chip makers have also been facing challenges, because of a cyclical slump in the industry.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    New York State Chosen as National Center for Chip Manufacturing Research

    The Biden administration will place a hub of a newly created national semiconductor technology center in upstate New York.The Biden administration is set to announce on Thursday that it will invest an estimated $825 million in a new federally funded semiconductor research facility in upstate New York.The decision to locate the facility in Albany comes after a long-running push by Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader and a Democrat of New York, to base it in his home state.Albany will serve as one major hub of a bigger organization, the National Semiconductor Technology Center, which will focus on computer chip research and development, Mr. Schumer’s office said. The center is a key part of the Biden administration’s efforts to revitalize American high-tech manufacturing and lessen the country’s dependence on foreign sources of technology.The New York site will focus on research into the complex machinery that is necessary to manufacture chips. The locations of the other two hubs, which will focus on how chips are designed and packaged together, will be announced later.Mr. Schumer said in an interview on Wednesday that the New York investment would produce research that benefited the country, cement U.S. leadership in advanced chip technology over China and provide a major source of manufacturing employment for the area.“This is historic,” he said. “It’s going to keep our country, our national security and our economic security way ahead.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    World’s Five Leading Chipmakers Have Now Promised U.S. Investment

    The announcement of CHIPS Act funding for a plant in Indiana means the United States will have attracted investment from the world’s top chipmakers.The Biden administration said on Tuesday that it would award up to $450 million in grants to a South Korean chipmaker, SK Hynix, to help build its new chip facility in Indiana, in what officials described as a milestone in rebuilding the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing industry.With the announcement, the United States now has commitments from all five of the world’s leading-edge semiconductor manufacturers to construct chip plants in the United States with financial assistance from the administration, Commerce Secretary Gina M. Raimondo said in a call with reporters on Monday. The Biden administration previously announced that it had reached agreements with Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Samsung and Micron to help fund investments in the United States.“These are the only companies in the world capable of producing leading-edge chips at scale,” she said.SK Hynix announced in April that it had committed to investing $3.87 billion in a facility in West Lafayette, Ind. Ms. Raimondo called that investment a “huge deal” because it meant that the United States would “have the most secure and diverse supply chain in the world for the advanced semiconductors that power artificial intelligence.” SK Hynix makes advanced memory chips that are an essential component for creating A.I.Commerce Department officials said that, with the SK Hynix grant, the United States had now allocated more than $30 billion of a $39 billion pot of funding that stems from the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan law aimed at building up domestic chip manufacturing and reducing America’s dependence on Asia for vital semiconductors.Only about 10 percent of the world’s semiconductors are manufactured in the United States, down from about 37 percent in 1990. Reversing the nation’s declining share of global chip manufacturing has been a major priority for President Biden and a key component of his economic policy agenda.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Defense Department Awards Chip Funding to Fuel Domestic Research

    The $238 million in grants will set up eight research hubs, as a small slice of the federal money that will go to chip companies and research facilities in the coming months.The Biden administration on Wednesday announced that it was awarding $238 million through the Defense Department to set up eight hubs around the United States for promoting innovation in the semiconductor industry.The funds are one of the earliest releases of the nearly $53 billion in grants and subsidies that Congress and the Biden administration have approved to build up the domestic semiconductor industry, which U.S. officials say has been left vulnerable by decades of offshoring.The Biden administration has a variety of funding programs in the works to encourage chip research institutions and manufacturers to set up operations in the United States. Most of these programs are run through the Commerce Department, and many will begin handing out money this fall.While U.S. companies still design many of the world’s most advanced chips, much of the manufacturing of the technology has been outsourced to foreign locations, including Taiwan, leaving U.S. chip supply vulnerable if, for example, the Chinese government were to invade Taiwan.The awards announced Wednesday will go to research institutes, consortiums and universities located in New York, Arizona, Indiana, Ohio, California, North Carolina and Massachusetts, defense officials said.Each hub will receive $15 million to $40 million to fund the development of new chips for use in electromagnetic warfare, artificial intelligence, 5G and 6G wireless technologies, and quantum computing, among other areas. While the research will be directed at meeting the needs of the Defense Department, it is also expected to be useful for commercial applications.Kathleen Hicks, the deputy defense secretary, said in a news conference Wednesday that the hubs would “tackle many technical challenges relevant to D.O.D.’s missions, to get the most cutting-edge microchips into systems our troops use every day: ships, planes, tanks, long-range munitions, communications gear, sensors and much more.”The funding also aims to accelerate what the industry refers to as the “lab-to-fab transition,” the process of taking new chip technologies and turning them into viable commercial products.David A. Honey, the deputy under secretary of defense for research and engineering, said the hubs would bring more prototype work to the United States.“Now we’ll be able to get it done here,” he said. “And also we’re building out in the areas that are just not available anywhere else.”The Commerce Department is separately setting up a string of research hubs for the semiconductor industry, collectively called the National Semiconductor Technology Center, drawing on $11 billion in funding it received for research and development.Appearing before the House Science, Space and Technology Committee on Tuesday, Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, said that her department was on track to formally unveil that technology center this fall.She also said that the department had received about 100 applications from companies hoping to receive grants that will be available to manufacturers.While Ms. Raimondo acknowledged that the grant program faced challenges, like securing enough workers to staff new chip plants, she said that if properly implemented, the program would make the United States “the premier destination in the world” for chip design, research and manufacturing.“That’s the vision that we’re trying to achieve with your support,” Ms. Raimondo told lawmakers.Ms. Raimondo was also questioned about the release in prior weeks of an advanced smartphone by Chinese telecom giant Huawei. The company is under heavy U.S. trade restrictions, administered by the Commerce Department, that theoretically should have prevented such an innovation.Ms. Raimondo said that she was upset by the development, but added that the U.S. government did not have any evidence that Chinese companies could manufacture the more sophisticated chips at scale.Ms. Raimondo said that the United States could take various defensive measures to limit China’s access to advanced technology, but “my strongly held view is that what we do on offense matters so much more.”“The reality is that over the past 30 years, this country has taken its eye off the ball of manufacturing,” she continued. “And when you don’t manufacture you lose out on innovation, and you become dependent on other countries.” More

  • in

    Huawei Phone Is Latest Shot Fired in the U.S.-China Tech War

    The release of a homegrown Chinese smartphone during a visit by the Biden official in charge of regulating such technology shows the U.S.-China tech conflict is alive and well.In the midst of the U.S. commerce secretary’s good will tour to China last week, Huawei, the telecom giant that faces stiff U.S. trade restrictions, unveiled a smartphone that illustrated just how hard it has been for the United States to clamp down on China’s tech prowess.The new phone is powered by a chip that appears to be the most advanced version of China’s homegrown technology to date — a kind of achievement that the United States has been trying to prevent China from reaching.The timing of its release may not have been a coincidence. The Commerce Department has been leading U.S. efforts to curb Beijing’s ability to gain access to advanced chips, and the commerce secretary, Gina M. Raimondo, spent much of her trip defending the U.S. crackdown to Chinese officials, who pressed her to water down some of the rules.Ms. Raimondo’s powerful role — as well as China’s antipathy toward the U.S. curbs — was reflected online, where more than a dozen vendors cropped up on Chinese e-commerce sites to sell phone cases for the new model with Ms. Raimondo’s face imprinted on the back. Doctored images showed Ms. Raimondo holding the new phone, next to phrases like “I am Raimondo, this time I endorse Huawei” and “Huawei mobile phone ambassador Raimondo.”Chinese media have referred to the phone as a sign of the country’s technological independence, but U.S. analysts said the achievement still most likely hinged on the use of American technology and machinery, which would have been in violation of U.S. trade restrictions.Beginning in the Trump administration and continuing under President Biden, the United States has steadily ramped up its restrictions on selling advanced chips and the machinery needed to make them to China, and to Huawei in particular, in an attempt to shut down China’s mastery of technologies that could aid its military.For the past several years, those restrictions have curtailed Huawei’s ability to produce 5G phones. But Huawei appears to have found a way around those restrictions to make an advanced phone, at least in limited quantities. Though detailed information about the phone is limited, Huawei’s jade-green Mate 60 Pro appears to have many of the same basic capabilities as other smartphones on the market.An examination of the phone by TechInsights, a Canadian firm that analyzes the semiconductor industry, concluded that the advanced chip inside was manufactured by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation of China and was operating beyond the technology limits that the United States has been trying to enforce. Douglas Fuller, an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School, said SMIC appeared to have used equipment stockpiled before restrictions went into effect, equipment licensed to it for the purpose of producing chips for companies other than Huawei, and spare parts acquired through third-party vendors to cobble together its production.“The official line in China of a heroic breaking of the technology blockade of the American imperialists is incorrect,” Mr. Fuller said. “Instead, the U.S. has allowed SMIC continued significant access to American technology.”Huawei and SMIC did not respond to a request for comment. The Commerce Department also did not respond to a request for comment.Chinese social media commentators and news sites celebrated the smartphone’s release as evidence that U.S. restrictions could not hold China back from developing its own technology.“Regardless of Huawei’s intentions, the launch of the Mate 60 Pro has been imbued by many Chinese netizens with a deeper meaning of ‘rising up under US pressure,’” the state-run Global Times said in an editorial.The phone was released during a week when both American and Chinese officials had issued numerous statements about renewed cooperation and communication. Chinese officials had asked for the United States to roll back its restrictions on chip exports. But Ms. Raimondo — whose email, along with other U.S. officials, was targeted this year by Chinese hackers — told reporters that she had taken a hard line on the technology controls in her meetings, saying the United States was not willing to remove restrictions or compromise on issues of national security.During the trip, Ms. Raimondo and her advisers set up a dialogue to share information about how the United States was enforcing its technology controls. She said the step would lead to better Chinese compliance but was not an invitation to the Chinese to try to water down export controls.Ms. Raimondo also met directly with the Chinese premier, Li Qiang, during her visit. The week before, Mr. Li had visited Huawei during a visit to southern China, according to the official Xinhua News Agency, and met with the company founder Ren Zhengfei.Phone cases in China displaying doctored photos of the U.S. commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo.MengyanThe release of the Huawei phone raises questions about whether Ms. Raimondo’s department will continue trying to build good will with Chinese officials — or potentially take a more aggressive stance toward cracking down on China’s access to American technology.The Biden administration is preparing to issue a final version of the technology restrictions it first put out last October, and the revised rules could come within weeks.Huawei’s development of the phone does not necessarily demonstrate a huge leap forward for Chinese technological prowess — or the total failure of U.S. export controls, analysts said.Because Chinese firms no longer have access to the most cutting-edge machines for making semiconductors, they have developed novel workarounds that use older machinery to create more powerful chips. But these methods are both relatively time-consuming for manufacturers, and produce a higher proportion of faulty chips, limiting the scale of production.“This does not mean China can manufacture advanced semiconductors at scale,” said Paul Triolo, an associate partner for China and technology policy at Albright Stonebridge Group, a consultancy. “But it shows what incentives U.S. controls have created for Chinese firms to collaborate and attempt new ways to innovate with their existing capabilities.”“It is the first major salvo in what will be a decade or more struggle for China’s semiconductor industry to essentially reinvent parts of the global semiconductor supply chain without U.S. technology included,” he added.Nazak Nikakhtar, a partner at Wiley Rein and a former Commerce Department official, said Huawei’s progress was “a result of longstanding U.S. policy” — specifically U.S. licenses that allow companies to continue selling advanced technologies to firms that the Commerce Department placed on a so-called entity list, like Huawei and SMIC.From Jan. 3 to March 31, 2022, the Commerce Department approved licenses for the sale of $23 billion of tech products to companies on the entity list, according to information released in February by the House Foreign Affairs Committee.“Where gaps exist in licensing policies, exports will get funneled through the gaps,” Ms. Nikakhtar said. “The U.S. government needs to close the gaps if its intention is to limit exports of critical technologies to China.”In a statement on Wednesday, Representative Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican who heads a congressional committee on China, called for ending all U.S. technology exports to both Huawei and SMIC. U.S. chip makers such as Qualcomm and Intel have received exporting licenses.Claire Fu More

  • in

    The U.S. and China Are Talking Again. Where It Will Lead Is Unclear.

    Gina Raimondo, the U.S. commerce secretary, and her Chinese counterparts agreed to continue economic talks, but such dialogues have a disheartening record.Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, expressed hopes that American and Chinese officials would work on improving the countries’ business relationship.Pool photo by Andy WongWhen Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, visited China this week, she joined a long line of U.S. politicians who have come to the country to try to sway Chinese officials to open their market to foreign businesses and buy more American exports, in addition to other goals.Ms. Raimondo left Shanghai on Wednesday night with no concrete commitments from China to treat foreign businesses more equitably or step up purchases of Boeing jets, Iowa corn or other products. In a farewell news conference, she said that hoping for such an outcome would have been unrealistic.Instead, Ms. Raimondo said her biggest accomplishment was restoring lines of communication with China that would reduce the chance of miscalculation between the world’s two largest economies. She and Chinese officials agreed during the trip to create new dialogues between the countries, including a working group for commercial issues that American businesses had urged her to set up.“The greatest thing accomplished on both sides is a commitment to communicate more,” Ms. Raimondo said on Wednesday.She had also delivered what she described as a tough message. The Biden administration was willing to work to promote trade with China for many categories of goods. But the administration was not going to heed China’s biggest request: that the United States reduce stringent controls on exports of the most advanced semiconductors and the equipment to make them.“We don’t negotiate on matters of national security,” Ms. Raimondo told reporters during her visit.While she called the trip “an excellent start,” the big question is where it will lead. There is a long history of frustrating and unproductive economic dialogues between the United States and China, and there are not many reasons to believe this time will prove different.Forums for discussion may have helped resolve some individual business complaints, but they did not reverse a broad, yearslong slide toward more conflict in the bilateral relationship. Now, the U.S.-China relationship faces a variety of significant security and economic issues, including China’s more aggressive posture abroad, its use of U.S. technology to advance its military and its recent raids on foreign-owned businesses.Ms. Raimondo says she has the backing of the president and U.S. officials. And Biden administration officials argue that even the shift to begin talking has been significant, after a particularly tense period. Relations between the United States and China became frosty last August when Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker at the time, visited Taiwan, and they froze entirely after a Chinese surveillance balloon flew across the United States in February.Ms. Raimondo’s trip capped a summer of outreach by four senior Biden officials. R. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China, who took office in January 2022 and accompanied Ms. Raimondo on the trip, said on Tuesday that American officials “literally were not talking to the Chinese leadership at a senior level, my first 15 months here.”“In a very, very challenging relationship, intensive diplomacy is critical,” he added.Not everyone views re-engagement as a good thing. Republican lawmakers, in particular, increasingly see the conflict between the United States and China as a fundamental clash of national interests. Critics view the outreach as an invitation for China to drag out reforms, or a signal to Beijing that the United States is willing to make concessions.“Of the more than two dozen great-power rivalries over the past 200 years, none ended with the sides talking their way out of trouble,” Michael Beckley, an associate professor of political science at Tufts University, wrote in Foreign Affairs this month. He added, “The bottom line is that great-power rivalries cannot be papered over with memorandums of understanding.”The space for compromise also seems narrow. Both governments have little desire to be seen by domestic audiences as making concessions. And in both countries, the share of trade that is considered off limits or a matter of national security concerns is growing.Ms. Raimondo at Shanghai Disneyland on Wednesday. She said her biggest accomplishment in her trip to China was restoring communication to reduce the chance of miscalculation.Pool photo by Andy WongMs. Raimondo expressed wariness at being drawn into unproductive talks with China — a persistent issue over the last several decades. But she also described herself as a pragmatist, who would push to accomplish what she could and not waste time on the rest.“I don’t want to return to the days of dialogue for dialogue’s sake,” she said. “That being said, nothing good comes from shutting down communication. What comes from lack of communication is mis-assessment, miscalculation and increased risk.”“We have to make it different,” Ms. Raimondo said of her new dialogue, adding that the U.S.-China relationship was too consequential. “We have to commit ourselves to take some action. And we can’t allow ourselves to devolve into a cynical place.”Kurt Tong, a former U.S. consul general in Hong Kong who is now a managing partner at the Asia Group, a Washington consulting firm, said Ms. Raimondo had offered China half of what it wanted. She sent a clear message that many American companies should feel free to do business in China, after years of receiving criticism for doing so during the Trump administration and still from many Republicans in Congress. But she did not agree to relax American export controls.“China is essentially forced by circumstances to accept that half a loaf,” Mr. Tong said, adding, “I do sense there is a real desire in Beijing to stabilize the relationship, both because of the geopolitical relationship but also, perhaps more important, the doldrums on the economic side.”The recent weakness in the Chinese economy may create some opening for compromise. The Chinese economy has only limped back from its pandemic lockdowns. China’s youth unemployment rate has risen, its debt is piling up, and foreign investment in the country has fallen, as multinational companies look for other places to set up their factories.In a meeting with Ms. Raimondo on Wednesday, the Shanghai party secretary, Chen Jining, admitted that the sluggish economy made business ties more crucial.“The business and trade ties serve the role as stabilizing ballast for the bilateral ties,” Mr. Chen said. “However, the world today is quite complicated. The economic rebound is a bit lackluster. So stable bilateral ties in terms of trade and business is in the interest of two countries and is also called for by the world community.”Ms. Raimondo met with Chen Jining, the Shanghai party secretary, on Wednesday.Pool photo by Andy WongMs. Raimondo responded that she was looking forward to discussing “concrete” ways they might be able to work together to accomplish business goals and “to bring about a more predictable business environment, a predictable regulatory environment and a level playing field for American businesses here in Shanghai.”Some of the issues that Ms. Raimondo raised during her visit — including intellectual property theft, patent protection and the inability of Visa and Mastercard to receive final approval for access to the Chinese market — are the very same ones that were discussed in economic dialogues with China more than a decade ago, including under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.For instance, China promised in 2001 as part of its entry into the World Trade Organization that it would quickly allow American credit card companies into its market, and it lost a W.T.O. case on the issue in 2012. But 22 years later, Visa and Mastercard still do not have equal access to the Chinese market.For more than three decades, commerce secretary visits to China followed a familiar script. The visiting American official would call on China to open its markets to more American investment, and to allow more equal competition among foreign and local companies. Then the commerce secretary would attend the signing of contracts for exports to China.That included Barbara H. Franklin, who in 1992, at the end of the George H.W. Bush administration, oversaw the signing of $1 billion in contracts and the re-establishment of commercial relations with China after the deadly Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989.Gary Locke of the Obama administration oversaw the signing of a broad contract in 2009 for the provision of American construction services. And Wilbur Ross, who went to China on behalf of President Donald J. Trump in 2017, came back with $250 billion in deals for everything from smartphone components to helicopters to Boeing jets.These deals did little to erase China’s enormous trade imbalance with the United States. China has fairly consistently sold $3 to $4 a year worth of goods to the United States for each dollar of goods that it purchased.In a sign of how much the focus of the relationship has shifted, Ms. Raimondo’s trip contained more discussion of national security than of new contracts. She gave her final news conference in a hangar at Shanghai Pudong Airport near two Boeing 737-800s, but did not mention the contract for several Boeings that China has yet to accept, much less any new sales.China, the world’s largest single market for new jetliners in recent years, essentially stopped buying Boeing jets during the Biden administration and switched to Airbus planes from Europe to show its unhappiness with American policies. Ms. Raimondo said on Tuesday that she had raised the lapse of Boeing purchases with Chinese leaders during her two days in Beijing.“I brought up all those companies,” Ms. Raimondo said. “I didn’t receive any commitments. I was very firm in our expectations. I think I was heard. And as I said, we’ll have to see if they take any action.” More