Beijing’s foreign ministry hit the MATCH Act on the eve of the Xi summit, with a 150-day alignment deadline for Japan and the Netherlands at the heart of the legislation
Beijing has sharpened its criticism of US legislation that would tighten controls on semiconductor manufacturing equipment, on the morning Donald Trump arrived in the Chinese capital for a state visit and summit with Xi Jinping.
The Chinese foreign ministry said the bill, the MATCH Act now moving through Congress, was further evidence of what spokesperson Lin Jian has repeatedly called Washington’s “overstretching of the concept of national security” and “malicious blocking and suppression” of Chinese industry.
The timing of the comments is the point. Trump and Xi are scheduled to meet on Thursday and Friday, with trade, AI, export controls, Taiwan, and the war in Iran on the agenda, and chip equipment is the most procedurally advanced of the technology files.
The Multilateral Alignment of Technology Controls on Hardware Act, introduced by Representative Michael Baumgartner on 2 April and given a Senate companion six days later by Pete Ricketts, Andy Kim, Jim Risch, and Chuck Schumer, cleared the House Foreign Affairs Committee on 22 April.
China’s Ministry of Commerce warned at the time that the bill would “severely disrupt the international economic and trade order.”
The bill names SMIC, Huawei, Hua Hong, CXMT, and YMTC as “covered facilities” and would prohibit the export to any of them of the deep-ultraviolet immersion lithography equipment that ASML still legally sells into China.
It would also ban allied firms from servicing machines already installed, a provision that would degrade existing Chinese fab capacity over time, since DUV systems require regular maintenance to sustain yield.
Most consequentially for diplomacy, it would give the Netherlands and Japan a 150-day window to align their own export rules with Washington’s or face unilateral enforcement via an expanded Foreign Direct Product Rule.
ASML, the sole supplier of the most advanced DUV systems, has already guided that its China revenue will fall to roughly 20% in 2026 from 33% the previous year. If the MATCH Act becomes law, the decline will be far steeper.
Applied Materials has projected up to $710 million in lost China revenue this fiscal year. Lam Research has said it expects China to fall below 30% of its revenue from the 43% it represented in the first quarter.
China’s countermeasures are already on the books. The State Council in April published Order No. 834, a supply-chain security regulation monitored by more than 15 agencies that authorises legal action against companies deemed to be harming Chinese supply chains.
Beijing has rotated through restrictions on gallium, germanium, antimony, seven medium and heavy rare earths, and silver across the past 18 months, suspending some while keeping licensing requirements in place, and has mandated that domestic chipmakers source half of new equipment from Chinese suppliers, a requirement that threatens an estimated $18 billion in annual American equipment sales.
The MATCH Act is in some respects the opposite of the executive branch’s January move, when the Trump administration shifted its export-review policy on Nvidia’s H200 and AMD’s MI325X from presumption of denial to case-by-case evaluation, a relaxation pushed for by Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, who has been added to Trump’s Beijing delegation this week after initially being left off.
Where the White House loosened controls on finished chips, Congress is tightening them on the tools used to make them, on the theory that lithography systems are harder to reroute than commodities.
Allied capitals are still digesting the 150-day provision. Japan, which implemented controls on 23 categories of chip equipment in 2023, and the Netherlands, which has limited ASML’s EUV and some DUV exports since 2024, would be required to expand those rules within five months or face US enforcement against any company using American technology in its supply chain.
What gets said in the summit room is unlikely to slow the legislative timetable. The MATCH Act is now at the full House stage, and its bipartisan profile makes it one of the few major China-policy bills moving without serious internal opposition.
Beijing’s calculation appears to be that the summit is the better venue to set the cost of passage on the record, while leaving the shape of retaliation for after. The Trump-Xi meeting begins Thursday morning, Beijing time.
