Striking Back Hard Against the US, China Announces 5 Countermeasures

China's strategy is simple: throw one punch to avoid a hundred.

On Wednesday, August 5, China fired back with five consecutive moves to counter a string of recent US measures that Beijing sees as hostile. A spokesperson for China's Ministry of Commerce called the countermeasures "generally restrained." The message was clear: since the China-US presidential meeting in Busan, the US Federal Communications Commission has ignored China's strong opposition and industry appeals. It keeps stretching the concept of national security to roll out restrictions on China.

Meanwhile, the US has added over 40 Chinese entities to the so-called Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act entity list. China demands the US immediately revoke these measures. And if Washington insists on new restrictions, "China will further retaliate."

China's moves are a direct answer to a series of petty US actions that fall into two main areas.

First, the FCC. Before the government took action, the People's Daily fired a warning shot. Under the byline "Zhong Sheng," it blasted the FCC for hiding behind banners like "non-discrimination" and "national security" to discriminate against and suppress Chinese companies.

The FCC recently added foreign-made power inverters and advanced robotic equipment to its so-called "Covered List." That means new models can't get certification and are locked out of the US market. The paper called the tactic typical unilateral bullying.

This isn't new. Back in 2021, the FCC put telecom and video surveillance gear from five Chinese companies on the list. Since then, it has steadily widened the net. In April, it proposed revoking the qualifications of testing and certification bodies from countries that haven't signed a "Mutual Recognition Agreement" with the US. That artificially raises the compliance bar for Chinese products.

And now, Reuters reports the FCC is drafting a ban on imports of new Chinese-made optical communication transceivers for data centers.

Second, the Xinjiang sanctions. On July 30, the US Department of Homeland Security added over 40 Chinese entities to the entity list under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. The move, effective August 3, swells the list from 144 to 187, the biggest expansion since it was created. The new targets span food, clothing, and cotton. They include snack maker Qia Qia melon seeds, frozen food producer Zhengzhou Synear dumplings, and apparel brand Fujian Septwolves.

When the news hit the Chinese internet, netizens erupted in mockery. The joke going around teasing that "eating melon seeds can easily damage US soldiers' teeth."

China didn't waste a second. It fired back with five countermeasures, and the first one hits where it hurts: drones. Beijing is tightening export controls on drones and related technologies to the US. From now on, every shipment of drones, key components, and controlled technologies will face a strict case-by-case review.

And forget about any 'licensing facilitation' exemptions—those are off the table. Think about it: China is the world's drone superpower. The US wanted to block Chinese drones from coming in. Now China is flipping the script—it's restricting what goes out. The message is blunt: just because you want to buy doesn't mean we'll sell. Especially not advanced drones and components with military uses.

The second measure is a highly targeted strike: China has added six US entities to its Countermeasures List, all of which it says assisted US sanctions on Xinjiang-related companies.

Applied DNA Sciences, Inc. is believed to provide DNA-based traceability and verification services for relevant products.

Stratum Reservoir, LLC is believed to conduct stable-isotope testing and related analysis to determine the origin of Xinjiang-linked materials.

Altana Technologies, Inc., which operates a global supply-chain mapping and management platform, is believed to help the US government trace supply chains involving Xinjiang-linked products.

The Responsible Business Alliance, which promotes responsible business conduct in global supply chains and operates assessment programmes for member companies, is believed to help companies exclude Xinjiang-linked products from their supply chains.

Verité Group, Inc., a nonprofit focused on labour rights and human rights, examines alleged forced labour in global supply chains.

Human Rights in China, a New York-based human-rights organization, advocates sanctions related to Xinjiang.

China’s countermeasures against these six entities are therefore highly targeted.

The third measure targets a US compliance testing company that helped the FCC impose China-related sanctions. That company will now be locked out of the compliance testing business in the Chinese market. The ripple effect: it could drive up compliance costs for US products trying to enter China.

The fourth measure hits at the heart of product certification. China is suspending the entrustment of US agencies to conduct factory follow-up inspections for CCC certification. Remember, CCC certification is a must-have for US products to enter the Chinese market. By pulling the plug on US inspectors, China shifts the review work to its own agencies. That spells more time and more uncertainty for American exporters.

The fifth measure, a national security investigation into imported US printing and copying office equipment. On the surface, this one looks like a light tap.

China imported about $2.08 billion worth of such equipment in 2025, mostly from Japan ($1.72 billion). The US slice was small. But this is just the opening move.

The US has banned Chinese software and hardware from connected and autonomous vehicles on American roads—and until now, China held its fire.

Now Beijing is investigating US printers and copiers on national security grounds. The message is unmistakable: if Washington plays the national security card at every turn, Beijing can just as easily slap an 'unsafe' label on American phones and EVs running US software.

But that's not the main battlefield. Artificial intelligence is the real arena. Over the past month, Chinese companies have rolled out one high-performance, low-cost AI model after another, sending US AI giants reeling. When Anthropic released a new model in June, the US government demanded it be kept out of non-American hands. The clash forced Anthropic to pull the model. Trump signed an executive order in June setting up an AI safety framework, including a voluntary program for companies to submit cutting-edge models for government review.

Then Chinese developers like Moonshot AI and DeepSeek unleashed open-source systems that rival top-tier US models, fueling a fierce debate in Washington over how to regulate open-weight models. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei pushed for mandatory government safety reviews for both open and proprietary models, taking direct aim at Chinese open-source systems. He won backing from Treasury Secretary Bessent and others, but ran into a wall of opposition from US tech giants, including Nvidia.

On August 4, the Trump administration delivered its verdict. In a meeting led by the Office of the National Cyber Director, top US AI companies were told that under the new AI safety framework, open-source models from Chinese rivals would not face US government safety testing.

For Anthropic, it was a crushing defeat. US National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross later spelled out the thinking at a cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas: the US government wants to back the American open-source AI ecosystem. He called such models 'tremendously valuable' and insisted the regulatory framework must stay 'flexible.'

Otherwise, he warned, 'it would not only stifle growth, development, and innovation, but the regulatory regime would become obsolete within 48 hours of completing its process.'

The bottom line: Washington keeps chipping away at China with petty moves. But when the pile gets high enough, Beijing punches back hard—and signals it has heavier blows ready.

President Xi is due to visit the US in September, and Trump will be in Shenzhen in mid-November for the APEC summit. Trump doesn't want things to spiral out of control; at crunch time, he'll yank the leash on his officials.

The real battlefield is artificial intelligence. It was almost certain that the White House's decision to leave Chinese open-source models alone came after fierce pushback from China.

 Lo Wing-hung

Bastille Commentary

** 博客文章文責自負,不代表本公司立場 **

Two national security cases have recently wrapped up in quick succession.

On Thursday (10 September), two members of the "Hong Kong Democratic Independence Union" were sentenced to three years, and three years and two months in prison respectively. Both had pleaded guilty to "conspiracy to commit secession" under the Hong Kong National Security Law.

Then today (11 September), sentence was passed in the "incitement to subversion" case against the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (the Alliance). Albert Ho Chun-yan, who pleaded guilty, was jailed for five years and two months.

The two defendants who pleaded not guilty, Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung, were jailed for seven years and seven years and three months respectively. 

The judge made it clear in sentencing why the Alliance case fell into the "serious circumstances" category. The case did not involve violence or any concrete method put forward by the defendants for "ending one-party rule."

But society was in turmoil at the time of the offence.

The defendants' activities continued for a full 14 months after the National Security Law came into force. Those activities were citywide in scope and attracted widespread attention.

The defendants believed that what they advocated might be unlawful, yet persisted regardless. The offending was premeditated.

The trials and tribulations Hong Kong has weathered since the handover amount to one giant political experiment. Every kind of political proposition has been put to the test, and we have seen the results.

Had these cases arisen in the early days after the handover, the verdicts might have read very differently to some.

Two young men aged 25 to 27, jailed for more than three years over a "nation-building union" that looked doomed to fail, might have seemed like the court making a mountain out of a molehill.

The same goes for the Alliance. Had its standing committee members been prosecuted in those early days, some might have felt they were merely chanting slogans to promote democracy. Perfectly harmless, undeserving of arrest and imprisonment.

But after more than two decades of development, we can now see with total clarity what these incendiary political activities can achieve. 

From the mass march against Article 23 legislation in 2003, to the illegal Occupy Central movement in 2014, to the all-out riots of 2019, unlawful activities escalated step by step until violent protests spun completely out of control.

The breaking point came on 11 November 2019 with the Ma On Shan incident, in which a man was set on fire. An utterly depraved manifestation of violent lawbreaking. 

The perpetrators believed they held the truth in their hands. They doused an unarmed civilian in flammable liquid and set him alight, intending to burn him to death. His only fault was trying to stop rioters vandalizing the MTR station.

Political violence had reached a point of no return, spiraling beyond control.

At the core of the Alliance stood the so-called traditional pan-democrats. They claimed to be promoting democracy in Hong Kong and the country. Yet they turned a blind eye to the street violence they themselves had incited, at times even tacitly condoning it. 

One need only look at what was exposed during the trial of Jimmy Lai to see this plainly. 

Back then, Lai instructed the senior management of Apple Daily to uphold "no distinction between the peaceful and the valiant".

In other words, they were not to draw a line between themselves and the valiant faction advocating violent struggle. That alone showed that the movement's descent into violence had the backing of big bosses behind the scenes. 

And behind these local opposition bosses stood the political forces of the United States and the West. 

Take Lee Cheuk-yan, a central figure in the Alliance case.

The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU), to which he belonged, relied for years on funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Beginning in 1994, the HKCTU applied every year for grants from the NED-affiliated American Center for International Labor Solidarity. The cumulative total came to HK$13 million. 

Here was an organization directly funded by a foreign government, running labor and social movements in Hong Kong. Who could believe it thinks independently?

Piece the whole picture together and the through-line becomes complete. Beginning in the late 1980s, in the closing stages of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the CIA set out to overthrow the entire socialist camp led by the Soviet Union. 

China's "June Fourth incident" also occurred against this backdrop.

While China and the United States had not yet fallen out completely, such activities proceeded in the shadows. After the rupture, and especially after Washington launched its trade war against China in 2018, the United States embarked on subversion against China without scruple. 

These were not activities to promote the development of democracy in China. They were subversive operations aimed at toppling state power. 

Consider this: the CIA today openly recruits spies targeting China. That tells you how grave the situation is.

With the Alliance case tried and sentenced, the legal boundary for such acts of subversion has now been clearly drawn. Do not imagine that chanting a few incendiary slogans or setting up some reactionary organizations is harmless. A single spark can start a prairie fire.

Drawing the legal red line is precisely about nipping these subversive activities in the bud.

Lo Wing-hung