6 Jan, 2023
Japan will “reinforce” its coordination with the United States to
restrict hi-tech exports to China, a senior Japanese trade official said
on Thursday amid US efforts to forge a united front with allies in the
chip war with Beijing. Yasutoshi Nishimura, Japan’s minister of economy,
trade and industry, also said Tokyo wanted to work more closely with
Washington to jointly develop dual-use technologies, citing rising
military challenges from Beijing following tensions across the Taiwan
Strait after then US House
“In order to address the misuse of
critical and emerging technologies by malicious actors and inappropriate
transfers of technologies, it is also absolutely imperative for us to
reinforce our cooperation in the area of export control,” Nishimura said
during remarks at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies
think tank in Washington. “We will implement strict export control
grounded in international cooperation while engaging closely in
exchanges of views with the United States and other relevant countries.”
His
remarks offered the latest signal that Japan was likely to join – if
not completely – the US chip ban against China amid a fierce
semiconductor war between the world’s two largest economies. The
administration of President Joe Biden made sweeping updates to its
export controls in October to inhibit Beijing’s ability to acquire
high-end US chip technology and equipment, and blocks US citizens from
working for certain firms. Since then, it has been argued that
Washington’s success depends on a unified stance from its key allies,
including advanced chip tool makers Japan and the Netherlands.
Whether
Washington was sacrificing its allies’ interests for its own has been a
point of contention, raising speculation as to which of its partners
and to what degree they would follow through. Japan
and the Netherlands have agreed in principle to join the US in
tightening controls over the export of advanced chipmaking machinery to
China, Bloomberg reported in December, citing people familiar with the
matter. After witnessing one global shock after the other following the
Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Japan learned that
“we must not be overly reliant on other countries, especially on only
one specific country, for goods and technologies that are indispensable
for our industries and our daily lives”, said Nishimura.
“Building
up our economic security is a matter of great urgency.” He said Japan
and the US should join forces to drive global innovation for
semiconductors, biotechnology and other important emerging
technologies. “To do this, we must make bold investments at a scale
never seen before.” US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who met with
Nishimura in Washington on. TNSHe hailed a joint project between IBM and
Japan’s government-backed chipmaker Rapidus to fabricate 2-nanometer
chips as “symbolic of Japan-US semiconductor cooperation” when talking
about his meeting with the US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on
Thursday morning.
He also called for expanding
bilateral hi-tech cooperation in the fields of quantum science and
technology and artificial intelligence. The Japanese minister will also
hold talks with US Trade Representative Katherine Tai on Friday, where
advancing international coordination on countering forced labour – a
bone of contention in the US-China trade relations – was on the agenda. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is scheduled to meet with Biden at the White House on January 13.
US
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin
will co-host the 2023 US-Japan Security Consultative Committee meeting
with Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi and Defence Minister
Yasukazu Hamada on Wednesday in Washington. “I would expect that there
will be discussion of the challenges that are presented” by China, State
Department spokesman Ned Price said on Thursday.
“Our
approach to PRC is, in many ways, rests on alignment with allies and
partners around the world,” he added. Japan’s cabinet revised its
national security strategy documents in December and upgraded China to
“an unprecedented and the greatest strategic challenge”. The newly
formulated documents showed that Japan “absolutely cannot tolerate
unilateral attempts to the status quo by force” in the East China Sea
and South China Sea, said Nishimura.
“Now, as
authoritarian countries are deepening their confidence in their own
military might, it is essential for us to solidly build up our
deterrence capabilities,” he said, noting Japan would invest more in
hybrid warfare-related technologies. “We hope to build up the
development of dual-use technologies and supply chain cooperation,
together with the [US] Department of Defence,” he said. Nishimura
said it was an undeniable fact that “authoritarian countries have
amassed tremendous power, both economically and militarily”.
He added: “A complete decoupling is also already impossible.”
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Additional reporting by Bochen Han in Washington