Was this information not available before? “The US has blacklisted China’s largest shipping line and two shipbuilders over alleged links with the People’s Liberation Army….” (“China’s Biggest Shipping Line Added to US Military Blacklist,” gCaptain, January 7, 2025).
The move also “signals increased scrutiny” of the difference between China’s massive shipbuilding industry, which produces “more than half of merchant vessels globally,” and the now-paltry U.S. shipbuilding industry.
Cosco Shipping Holdings Co. was named in a Federal Register filing on Tuesday, qualifying it as a Chinese military company as determined by the Pentagon, along with China State Shipbuilding Corp. and China Shipbuilding Trading Co. While the blacklist carries no specific penalties, it discourages US firms from dealing with those companies….
Chinese shipbuilders accounted for almost 60% of the worldwide orderbook in the first quarter of last year, according to shipbroker BRS. The US’s nervousness over this dominance comes as shipping lines and ports become increasingly important as arenas of geopolitical competition, with Covid-19 and its aftermath exposing the fragility of global supply chains.
Washington telegraphed its unease over China’s shipbuilding industry at Senate hearings last year. The US builds only one container ship for every 359 such vessels that China constructs, Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democratic congressman for Illinois, said at the time.
The latest Pentagon blacklist also included Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., as well as Chinese oil major Cnooc Ltd.
Information about the problems with Cosco and another recent addition to the Pentagon blacklist, the Chinese oil company Cnooc, was indeed available before.
“Both Cosco and Cnooc have been previously targeted by Washington. Cosco was sanctioned in 2019 for hauling Iranian oil, with those penalties lifted in 2020. Cnooc was one of the earliest Chinese state-owned enterprises to be hit with US sanctions and was also added to a Pentagon blacklist in 2021.”
It shouldn’t be so easy for a major CCP-controlled company to escape U.S. sanctions or blacklisting if it is the sort of company that must be sanctioned again or blacklisted again a few years later.
Why blacklist?
According to Defense News, “The Defense Department updates its list of ‘Chinese Military Companies,’ or CMC list, annually. With the latest revision, it includes 134 companies.” One purpose is to “restrict the sharing of advanced technology [with foreign adversary China], including semiconductors and AI, deeming it to be a threat to national security.”
Being on the list is also “a warning to businesses in the United States that working with companies on the list could get them barred from future Pentagon contracts.”
Certain consequences of the listing happen immediately, like slumps in the stock prices of newly listed companies.
Objection
The Pentagon’s blacklist is a bad idea, according to the Chinese Communist Party.
The Global Times, a CCP propaganda outlet, asserts that “Anyone with a discerning eye can easily recognize this as a poorly disguised attempt by the US to suppress Chinese leading tech companies under the clumsy excuse of so-called ‘national security.’ ” No one can gainsay the fact that the people at the CCP are experts in the field of poorly disguised, clumsy abuses of the term “national security.”
The Pentagon’s list of “Entities Identified as Chinese Military Companies Operating in the United States,” which also now includes the game and technology firm Tencent, the artificial intelligence firm SenseTime, and “the world’s biggest battery maker CATL,” is available online.
