The United States has designated Chinese corporate giants Alibaba, BYD and Baidu as companies that support China’s military, expanding its blacklist to some of the country’s best-known commercial brands.
The Pentagon included the firms in an update on Monday that is likely to complicate the fragile detente under way between Washington and Beijing after years of rocky relations.
China’s embassy in Washington, DC, condemned the listing as “discriminatory” and an example of the US government “overstretching” the concept of national security.
“Chinese companies that do business overseas have been strictly observing laws and regulations of their host countries,” an embassy spokesperson said.
“The US should stop its wrong practice and create a fair, just and non-discriminatory environment for Chinese companies.”
Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce company, said there was “no basis” for its inclusion on the blacklist.
“Alibaba is not a Chinese military company nor part of any military-civil fusion strategy,” a company spokesperson said.
“We will take all available legal action against attempts to misrepresent our company.”
Baidu said there was “no credible justification” for its listing.
“The suggestion that Baidu is a military company is entirely baseless,” a company spokesperson said.
“We will not hesitate to use all options available to us to have the company removed from the list.”
BYD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Firms included on the list, which was created in 2021, and entities under their control will be barred from consideration for US defence contracts under rules set to come into effect later this month.
The Pentagon defines “Chinese military companies” as entities owned or controlled by the Chinese military, or that contribute to China’s “military civil fusion”, referring to Beijing’s strategy of melding civilian and defence-related research and innovation.
Companies must also carry out some of their operations in the US to be designated.
In its updated list, the Pentagon said Alibaba, BYD and Baidu supported China’s military development via their affiliations with the state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
Republican lawmaker John Moolenaar, who chairs the US House of Representatives committee on strategic competition with the Chinese Communist Party, said the updated list served as a warning about Chinese companies working against US national interests.
“Any of them that are publicly traded on US exchanges should be immediately delisted and their products should be removed from supply chains our country depends on,” Moolenaar said in a statement.
“American companies must stop doing business with these threats to our national security, otherwise they are enabling China’s military ascendance.”
The expansion of the blacklist comes less than a month after US President Donald Trump met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing for a two-day summit aimed at lowering the temperature in their countries’ years-long trade war and tech rivalry.
Alibaba, Baidu, and BYD are among China’s most prominent brands, claiming the top spots in the e-commerce, internet search and electric vehicle markets, respectively.
The addition of several household brands not normally associated with the defence sector mirrors last year’s designation of tech firm Tencent, the owner of the ubiquitous messaging app WeChat.
Other additions to the list include RoboSense Technology, an AI and robotics company with headquarters in Shenzhen, and Hangzhou-based Unitree Robotics.
RoboSense Technology and Unitree Robotics did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Dennis Wilder, a national security expert who worked on China at the CIA and the White House’s National Security Council, expressed scepticism about the feasibility of implementing such a “broad-brush” blacklist.
“Although it may make some US firms wary of engaging with the labelled entities, in fact, many US firms already have deep relationships with these entities that they are not going to give up unless there are real penalties attached to working commercial deals with them,” Wilder told Al Jazeera.
“Sanctions that range this widely are sanctions that don’t work. Unless the US is willing to decouple from the Chinese economy altogether, these sanctions are simply performative,” Wilder said.