After decades of U.S. efforts to engage China with the prospect of greater development through trade, the era of cooperation is coming to a screeching halt.

The White House and Congress are quietly reshaping the American economic relationship with the world’s second-largest economic power, enacting a strategy to limit China’s technological development that breaks with decades of federal policy and represents the most aggressive American action yet to curtail Beijing’s economic and military rise.

The new federal rules, executive orders and pending legislation aimed at China’s high-tech sectors, which began this fall and will continue in 2023, are the culmination of years of debate spanning three administrations. Taken together, they represent an escalation of former President Donald Trump’s tariffs and trade disputes against Beijing that could ultimately do more to slow Chinese technological and economic development — and divide the two economies — than anything the 45th president did while in office.

“You really have seen a sea change in the way that they’re looking at the relationship with China,” said Clete Willems, who helped design China economic policy in the Trump White House as Deputy Assistant to the President for International Economics and Deputy Director of the National Economic Council. “[The Biden] administration views Chinese indigenous innovation as a per se national security threat … and that is a big leap from where we’ve ever been before.”

[Give me a break on the comparisons between the two administrations. This is a “sea change” for Biden, who spent the 2020 campaign scoffing at the idea that China could compete with the US, let alone present a significant threat. The “sea change” took place in Trump’s administration; Biden’s merely following through. — Ed]