CLAIM: Vice President Kamala Harris accused former President Donald Trump of having “sold us out” to the Chinese government with policies that “ended up selling American chips to China,” during Tuesday night’s debate.
VERDICT: FALSE. The Trump administration blocked the takeover of an American semiconductor maker by a Chinese investor, restricted exports to China’s top chipmaker, and largely limited sales to China and even to third countries who do business with Chinese companies considered a national security threat, such as the telecommunications company Huawei. The administration of President Joe Biden, under which Harris serves, reportedly started greenlighting third party suppliers to sell chips to Huawei in 2021.
During the first presidential election debate between Trump and Harris, the vice president responded to a question regarding Biden’s decision to keep some Trump-era tariffs on China by attacking Trump more generally on his China policy.
“He invited trade wars — you want to talk about his deal with China?” Harris said. “What he ended up doing is, under Donald Trump’s presidency, he ended up selling American chips to China to help them improve and modernize their military — basically sold us out when a policy about China should be in making sure the United States of America wins the competition for the 21st century.”
Harris defined that win as “focusing on relationships with our allies” as well as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, among other issues.
Trump replied by stating that, thanks to left-wing policies, “they [China] bought their chips from Taiwan — we hardly make chips anymore because of philosophies like they have and policies like they have,” and continuing to affirm that Harris “has no policy” personally.
The Trump administration, facing significant criticism from both the left and the libertarian right, imposed prominent limits on trade with China, particularly in the realm of chipmaking and semiconductors. In 2017, the Trump administration prevented Chinese investors from buying an American semiconductor company, Lattice Semiconductor.
“As China moves to build and design chips, Chinese investors has acquired overseas chip makers and teamed up with Western technology giants. The deal for Lattice Semiconductor played to those ambitions,” the New York Times reported at the time.
In 2020, towards the end of Trump’s term, his administration blocked American companies from several major exports to Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), China’s top chipmaker. Sales to SMIC, the Department of Commerce asserted, “may pose an unacceptable risk of diversion to a military end use in the People’s Republic of China” — making the limitations a policy specifically preventing the “selling out” of American technology to China, as Harris accused during the debate.
The policies to limit Chinese access to American technology were not without political cost to the Trump administration. As Chad Bown, writing for the Peterson Institute for International Economics, explained in a column critical of Trump in 2020, the president began cracking down on sales of semiconductors and other critical chip technology at a time of “robust export sales despite the pandemic and anti-China rhetoric of a US election campaign” — effectively in response to the perceived national security threat.
“The Trump administration is remaking the US export control regime in a way that could lead to sharp cuts in foreign sales of both of these American industries. Elements of the new regime may be well-motivated, seeking to mitigate legitimate national security risks,” the think tank opined. “Other links to national security are, at best, more tenuous and will certainly come at considerable economic cost to American companies.”
Bown expressed particular concern with the fact that Trump’s administration did not stop at limiting direct sale sales to China:
The administration’s newest restrictions do more than shut off technology exports to China. The policy limits some American sales to third countries, even when they are US military allies. American semiconductor toolmakers cannot sell their equipment to major semiconductor manufacturers in South Korea or Taiwan, for example, if companies there want to use American tools to make anything to sell to Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company targeted by the administration as a national security threat.
The Biden administration began turning the tide of these policies in 2021. In August of that year, Reuters reported — citing “people familiar with the process” — that Biden “has granted licenses authorizing suppliers to sell chips to Huawei for such vehicle components as video screens and sensors.”
More recently, in April, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) sent a letter to U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo asking for clarification after Huawei announced the debut of a computer model using technology made by the American company Intel, implying that the Biden administration greenlit the sale of Intel technology to a company widely considered a global security threat.
