Continuity in Competition: US-China Tech Rivalry under Trump and Biden

With renewed trade tensions under Trump 2.0, US-China tech competition has intensified beyond Biden’s ‘small yard, high fence’ tech policy to now entail global implications.

This month, the Chairman of the US House Select Committee on China objected to recent reports that suggest the Trump administration may permit export of certain AI-relevant chips to China, after initially restricting their sales in April 2025.

While there is no official word from the Trump administration on this supposed policy reversal, the move is reportedly part of the easing of bilateral tensions, including the US freezing some export controls to secure a trade deal with China.

Following bilateral talks in Geneva in May 2025 and London in June 2025, China and the US slashed tariffs on each other (for a period of 90 days) and eased deadlocks over tech issues. The latter primarily included China’s restrictions on critical rare-earth minerals in the face of rising US restrictions on critical tech components (chiefly, semiconductors).

The supposed policy reversal on exporting chips to China (albeit only of less-powerful variants like Nvidia’s H20 chips) has prematurely sparked speculations of a ‘grand bargain’ between China and the US.

However, over the last two US administrations, there has been robust policy continuity and interlinked precedents on stemming China’s tech advances, which have complicated prospects for any major policy reversal.

Biden and the Trump playbook

Under US President Joe Biden (2021-2025), the US not only left in-place Trump-era (2017-21) US tariffs on China (on over USD 300 billion-worth Chinese imports), but also drew from the ‘Trump playbook’ on limiting China’s tech advances.

The approach included export controls to limit flow of tech components to China, barring use of federal funds to purchase Chinese tech equipment, and indicting Chinese tech companies for espionage activities. While the previous Trump administration (2017-21) used these measures primarily against Chinese offerings in the 5G and next-gen telecommunications domain, the Biden administration expanded the scope to also include other technologies.

Under the then US NSA Jake Sullivan’s ‘small yard and high fence’ policy of tech competition with China, the Biden administration not only expanded the ambit of critical technologies, but also adopted more means to limit China’s tech advances.

Notably, the Biden administration hailed the use of export controls as “a new strategic asset in the US and allied toolkit” and surpassed the Trump administration’s tally of Chinese companies added to the US Commerce Department’s ‘Entity List’.

Moreover, the Biden administration widened the ambit of critical technologies to also address China’s “overcapacity” in clean technologies. This included increased tariffs on EVs, Lithium-ion batteries, solar cells, etc.

The Biden administration also focused on the flow of capital in addition to the flow of tech. Biden signed an Executive Order requiring outbound US investors to notify the US Treasury Department in case of investments in key domains like semiconductors, quantum computing, and AI components.

Trump 2.0 and Biden’s precedents

The current Trump administration (2025-present) has demonstrated continuity with its predecessor administration on introducing more means to restrict China’s tech advances.

The Trump administration has complemented the Biden-era focus on outbound investments with similar guidelines for inbound investments.

In February 2025, President Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) on promoting foreign investment while protecting national security. The Trump administration announced that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) will “restrict Chinese investments in strategic US sectors like technology, critical infrastructure, healthcare, agriculture, energy, raw materials, and others.”  This directive also focused on ownership of farmland in key locations by calling for strengthening CFIUS purview over greenfield investments.

The Trump administration has also built upon Biden-era additions to the Entity List. Its March 2025 addition of over 50 Chinese entities to restrict Beijing’s “ability to acquire and develop high-performance and exascale computing capabilities” for military applications, also included six subsidiaries of Chinese cloud-computing firm Inspur Group, which was added to the Entity List by the Biden administration in 2023.

The Trump administration has also followed through on the Biden administration’s tariffs on Chinese semiconductors (starting January 2025) and the December 2024 ‘Section 301’ probe into Chinese semiconductors used in US consumer products.

Moreover, the focus on semiconductors experienced a fillip following the launch of DeepSeek, which highlighted China’s advances in the AI domain.

In 2022 and 2023, the Biden administration announced restrictions on companies like Nvidia, AMD and Intel on their export of AI-relevant chips to China. However, this left out less-powerful variants (like Nvidia’s H20 series). Then-US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo reportedly contemplated action against such variants as well, but eventually backed down.  

In April 2025 however, the Trump administration also mandated export licensing requirements for Nvidia’s H20, AMD’s MI308, and any such less-powerful equivalents.

In May 2025, the US Commerce Department also issued letters to Electronic Design Automation (EDA) companies (like Cadence, Synopsys and Siemens EDA) to stop supplying chip-designing software to China.

Caught in the middle

This Trump-Biden-Trump continuity on US-China tech competition is now increasingly drawing other nations into the fray.

Even as the Trump administration has recently eased restrictions on US export of Ethane, jet engines, and chip design software to China, the global implications of the US-China tech competition are apparent.

Recently, Malaysia began mandating permits for the export of high-end American AI chips to clamp down against circumvention of restrictions on tech components reaching China.

In March 2025, shortly after the Trump administration announced that it was investigating links between Singaporean entities and Chinese tech companies, Singapore arrested three men involved in re-export of Nvidia chips to China’s DeepSeek.

On Biden-era efforts to level the playing field for US companies (like Lam Research, KLA and Applied Materials) complying with curbs on semiconductor equipment, Trump officials have reportedly continued to engage with Japanese and Dutch officials to seek compliance from their companies (chiefly, Tokyo Electron Ltd. and ASML Holding NV).

Amid the scrutiny on transhipment of American chips, earlier this month, media reports revealed that China’s Huawei Technologies is seeking to ink attractive export deals (for its Ascend 910B and 910C AI chips) with customers in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

However, it is unclear whether any such deals have been finalised, possibly in view of the Biden-era precedent of the US predicating investment deals upon partners severing links with Chinese tech suppliers. (Case in point: Microsoft’s investment in G42, UAE)

Even as the US and China now work towards another round of discussions to extend their tariff truce and address other bilateral irritants, the ripple-effects of their tech rivalry are apparent. Nations are now facing the binaries of American and Chinese propositions, with mounting pressures of regulatory compliance, sourcing, and investments for technologies that are increasingly vital for the future of development and governance.

Kashish Parpiani is the co-author of ‘America and the Indo-Pacific - Trump and Beyond’ (Routledge, 2022). Kashish is also part of the 2025-26 cohort of the Network for Advanced Study of Technology Geopolitics (NAST) Fellowship at the Takshashila Institution.

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Kashish Parpiani