Washington's move against Chinese firms will only make US increasingly isolated: China Daily editorial

By adding 59 Chinese companies, including the country's top chipmaker SMIC and drone manufacturer DJI, to its trade blacklist on Friday, the Donald Trump administration may be trying to make it even harder than it already was for the next administration to mend bilateral relations with China, and maintain its tough-on-China image until the end.

But whatever the intentions are behind the move, it will not convince the world that the Trump administration is a responsible government.

Offering "evidence of activities between SMIC and Chinese military industrial companies of concern" or enabling "wide scale human rights abuses" as the justifications for the move are not even worth refuting as it is the same groundless gobbledygook that the administration has spouted time and again.

Not only are the US administration's actions — in launching a trade war against China and imposing increasingly harsh sanctions on Chinese companies — against normal trade rules, they also damage the development of both Chinese and US companies.

It is also consequential to the global industrial chains and supply chains, and therefore seriously affects the development of the world economy when the normal running of the global economy makes a great difference to the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The addition of the 59 Chinese companies to the Entity List comes at a time when the Chinese economy — after China's success in largely containing the spread of the coronavirus in the country — is propping up the declining global economy and doing its bit to help with the global fight against the pandemic.

Instead of softening its unilateralist stand and working more with the world's second-largest economy, if only to help the world through this pandemic, the Trump administration is trying to undermine what China is doing to support the global fight and the world economy.

It is targeting everything Chinese, without ever thinking about how the US high-tech companies will fare without cooperation with their Chinese counterparts and how important the Chinese economy is to the global economy.

They will undoubtedly be disappointed, as the bottom will not fall out of the Chinese economy and it will not impede China's development of science and technology. Washington's blacklisting of Chinese companies to prevent them from getting US technologies will only backfire, as China will redouble its efforts to develop the technologies it needs on its own.

China is doing whatever it can to make its economy an inclusive one and to open wider to the outside world. It welcomes cooperation with the US. But that does not mean that China can be bullied. Beijing will take countermeasures against Washington's unreasonable and irrational moves.

The US will turn out to be increasingly isolated if Washington continues to believe that it can ride roughshod over the rest of the world in whatever way it likes.