China last week was warned the US was considering imposing full sanctions on Beijing s military businesses for helping Russia continue its invasion of Ukraine.
While China has been the biggest supplier of weapons and technology to Pakistan in recent years, the link between a Belarusian entity and Pakistan has come as a surprise to many experts. Ukraine, however, is known to have supplied defence items to Pakistan since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. On the implications of the sanctions, the US said, "As a result of today s action, all property and interests in property of the designated persons described above that are in the US, or in possession or control of US persons, are blocked and must be reported to the Department of Treasury s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)."
This could seriously hinder China s ability to develop large artificial intelligence (AI) models as South Korean companies like Samsung and SK Hynix take the lead.
In a lengthy column published by the Communist Party s main magazine, Minister for Industry and Information Technology Jin Zhuanglong called attention to how China occupies the lower and middle tiers of the global value chain and thus lacks the ability to master its fate.
US threats of ‘consequences’ if Beijing supports Russia could target China’s large foreign reserve assets, a significant portion of which is made up of US government bonds, Chinese economists say.