Photo: GT

The US relentless sanctions against Chinese technology companies are nothing but another mosquito bite that will not disrupt China's pace in high tech development, said an expert with China's Commerce Ministry.

This came as the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), an agency of the United States Department of Commerce, said in a statement on Thursday that they have added seven Chinese supercomputing firms to the sanctions list for conducting alleged activities that are contrary to the US national security or foreign policy interests.

The seven Chinese firms are Tianjin Phytium Information Technology, Shanghai High-Performance Integrated Circuit Design Center, Sunway Microelectronics, the National Supercomputing Center in Jinan, the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, and the National Supercomputing Center in Zhengzhou, according to the statement.

The statement claimed that these entities are building supercomputers used by China's military on its modernization efforts or to develop weapons of mass destruction programs, an old fashioned rhetoric by the US government. Experts say that it reveals that the guiding ideology of the US, to guard itself against China's competition, has never changed.

But these new sanctions are not much different from those the US had already imposed, Mei Xinyu, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation of China's Ministry of Commerce, told the Global Times on Thursday. He also noted that the US has been placing many restrictions on Chinese technology that could be used in the military, including computers, and this latest move has merely tightened existing sanctions, rather than imposing new ones.

Despite the pressure from the US throughout time, Chinese technology companies have been making achievements under the shadow of sanctions.

"It's like mosquitoes are biting us. They've been harassing us for years, so it doesn't matter to us to have one more bite," said Mei.

Instead, the increasing sanctions from the US will only boost the Chinese companies to ramp up efforts on their own research and development to breach the technology gap in fields like semiconductors and computing, said Mei.

In response to the relentless US sanctions on Chinese firms, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, said during a press conference in March that the US government abused the concept of national security and state power and went all out to suppress Chinese high tech companies to maintain its monopoly and hegemony in science and technology. 

"This negates the market economy principles the US has claimed to champion and reveals its hypocrisy in touting so-called fair competition," said Zhao.