Key Points:

● There has been a growing concern among American consumers, pro-trade business groups, and other various sectors to the policy measures taken by the U.S. government in managing the country’s economic, trade, and technological relations with China.

● Geostrategic factors trumped technical factors in affecting American Companies’ business decisions.

● 99% of the American companies considered the positive China-U.S. bilateral relations mattering significantly to their business growth.

● Among the top five business challenges, the rising tension in China-U.S. relations over the past four consecutive years has been ranked number one by the American businesses.

● 86% of the American companies acknowledged that innovation and research were important to their business growth in China. Nevertheless, the top barrier to innovation was concerns on potential U.S.-China tech decoupling.

It has been about six years already since the U.S. started to adopt a series of new policy measures in dealing with the country’s economic and trade relations with China, known as the trade war between the two countries. From the perspective of the U.S policy-makers, the objectives of these measures were to cut China-U.S trade imbalances, improve the situation of intellectual property rights transfer, protect the U.S. supply chains and industries and so on.

After the Biden administration assumed office, generally apart from keeping the measures taken by the former U.S. government in place, alongside the implementation of the U.S. grand strategy in the Indo-Pacific region, the Biden government from occasion to occasion has further raised the level of relevant measures in managing China-U.S. relations in the economic, trade, and technological fields, consisting of adding more Chinese companies into the Entity List, introducing stricter tariff measures on Chinese imports, and adopting a series of more targeted export control measures in limiting the exports of high-end tech products to China in line with a “small yard and high fence” policy.

A few years back, it wasn’t clear what implications the set of policy measures could possibly generate to American consumers, businesses, and other sectors. Six years on, the consumers and businesses from various sectors have expressed their rising concerns to the measures adopted by the U.S. government.

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