Washington puts Chinese nuclear giant, subsidiaries on Entity List to ban exports

The US has added China General Nuclear Power Corp (CGN), China’s largest stateowned nuclear company, and several of its subsidiaries to its Entity List, barring US companies from selling products to those enterprises.

Experts said that the ban is part of a series of US moves to crack down on China’s hightechnology sector, but those moves have in effect accelerated China’s efforts to seek technological independence.

The US government said that companies on the entity list have been acting “contrary to” the US’ national security or foreign policy interests, according to a statement published by the Federal Register on its website.

Commenting on the US’ move, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying said on Thursday that the US is abusing the use of export control measures.

It is not only hurting Chinese companies but also affecting overseas companies including those from the US, Hua said.

“After preliminary evaluation, the incident’s influence on CGN is controllable,” CGN said in a statement it sent to the Global Times on Wednesday.

Some of the nuclear power plants being built by CGN are reportedly based on technology from US nuclear plant builder Westinghouse Electric.

The US announced in October 2018 it would tighten controls on China’s imports of civil nuclear technology to prevent its use for military or other purposes amid China-US trade tensions.

“How much the ban hurts CGN and its subsidiaries depends on whether those Chinese companies need to import some irreplaceable but key technologies or products from the US. As far as I know, the answer is no,” Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, told the Global Times on Thursday.