The Roles Of The Industrial Associations Play In The U.S Export Control System

Since the Founding of the Peoples Republic of China, the United States has been imposing strict export controls towards China, in the aim of slowing down China's military, economic, and scientific advancement. Although in the last couple decades, there was a great surge in Sino-U.S trade, and the U.S is facing increasing Sino-U.S trade deficit, The U.S still maintains its export control policy against China, and in the foreseeable future, such controls will continue. Therefore to have a better understanding of the U.S export control policy and how the industrial associations influence its domestic deliberation process has profound theoretical and practical meaning. This thesis tries to answer following questions: On which aspects of the U.S export controls system do industrial associations try to exert their influence? What are the means of their effort in this area? How effective are they, when do their effort succeed and when do they fail?Methodologically, this research is taking a comprehensive and categorical approach to provide a thorough description of what roles the industrial associations play in the U.S export control system. The author collected extensive first hand information by having face to face interviews with U.S government officials, scholars and industrial leaders during the visit to Washington D.C in the spring of 2003. When evaluating the effectiveness of the industrial associations actions, the author provided several case studies to illustrate when the associations are successful in influencing the export control policy and when they fail. The study finds that the industrial associations play critical roles by being the bridge between the government and the business sector on the export control issues. At the same time, the associations help the government to have an up to date understanding of the new development of critical technologies. Through this study, we can infer that in general, if a particular issue concerning national security and economic prosperity is being scrutinized by the public media and politicized by politicians, then the economic interests will have a hard time to prevail, and the industry's influence is very limited. The economic and security relationship between China and the U.S is very complex. On national security, both countries feel the other is a threat; on economic front, China and the U.S are major trading partners and both benefited very much from the economic interaction. Therefore, there are scholars naturally wish that the strong economic relationship can help to improve the landscape of Sino-U.S security dilemma, but this study finds that such wishful thinking can't be easily realized.