Xi Cheese, Real-Life Harem in China’s Silicon Valley, Knicks Playoffs, and BIS
Fed up with all our AI coverage? Well, here’s what else lives in my brain…
Xi Cheese
Macron served Xi some cheese. He was not amused.
This iconic photo reminds me of a classic Fuchsia Dunlop essay from 2005 about when she took top Sichuan chefs to the French Laundry and Chez Panisse. An excerpt:
“How am I supposed to eat this?” asks Yu Bo 喻波, puzzling over the red snapper that has sent me off into flights of ecstasy. He is as confused as a Westerner faced with her first bowl of shark’s-fin soup, plateful of sea cucumber, or serving of stir-fried ducks’ tongues. I’ve often seen this scenario in China, but this is the first time I’ve witnessed it from the other side.
Sichuanese cuisine is comparable to French cuisine in its sophistication, and it is legendary in China for its diversity of flavors. In the West, however, as Lan Guijun 兰桂均 observes, “People just label Sichuanese food as hot and spicy; the layering of flavors is completely lost on them.” This is largely due to the fact that few people outside China have encountered the genuine article. It’s the same for the Sichuanese when it comes to authentic Western food.
In the beginning, they are game for trying almost anything, so I seize the opportunity to ply them with all kinds of unfamiliar tastes and textures. At our hotel, I tempt them with ripe Stilton and Roquefort, aged Parmigiano-Reggiano, capers, and chicory. The cheeses are a particular challenge, as they are completely alien to the Chinese diet (though they do invite comparison with fermented and “stinking” bean curds). The chefs sample politely, without much enthusiasm, although Yu Bo uses a very positive term, xian 鲜 (the Chinese equivalent of umami), to describe the taste of the blue-veined Roquefort.
In restaurants, the Western foods they like best are always those that have the closest affinity with Chinese food: barbecued pork chops, roast chicken, puréed squash. The only dish they polish off completely is a seafood risotto: perfectly edible, they all agree, though they find it hilarious to be charged such a high price for a simple bowl of tang fan 汤饭 (soupy rice).
But there are strong taboos I haven’t anticipated. The most striking is the visceral dislike of rawness. In China, the consumption of raw foods was historically viewed as a barbarian habit, and most everything is still eaten cooked. The chefs are horrified by the rare, bloody meat they are offered in America. And after two days of buffet lunches at the school, they are even tiring of salads: “If I eat any more raw food I’m going to turn into a savage,” jokes Xiao Jianming 肖见明 with a wicked grin.
They find crusty sourdough bread uncomfortably tough and chewy. Despite the Chinese love of the slithery, gristly textures that are repulsive to most Westerners (think chickens’ feet, jellyfish, and goose intestines), there doesn’t seem to be an immediate equivalent in Chinese food to this bread’s particular mouthfeel. The daring Yu Bo continues to taste and analyze everything, even when the other two are running out of steam. I watch him, fascinated, as he chews his first-ever mouthful of artichoke heart, samples maple syrup, inhales for the first time the bouquet of a good red wine.
In a strange mirroring of cultural attitudes, just as Westerners complain of feeling hungry within an hour of dining at a Chinese restaurant, in America these Chinese travelers face the recurrent problem of not feeling full. In particular, they are yearning for rice. One evening, after consuming several courses in the European manner, Xiao Jianming actually makes me ask if our restaurant can rustle up a quick egg fried rice, a perfectly normal request in China. (They can’t, of course, because they don’t have any cooked rice on hand.)
Jordan—The Knicks Playoff Run
I went to my first Knicks home game since COVID to watch Game 1 of their series with the Pacers. Perhaps the greatest alpha I had was watching the 2021 KD Nets playoff run in person right after the vaccine hit. People were still skittish about going to stuff in person, and the Nets don’t have diehards, so I got to witness some legendary individual performances in the playoffs for $50 a ticket.
But it is so, so much more fun watching a team that has real fans and likable players. A dialed-in playoff arena is a uniquely human experience that connects you to millennia of fans who’ve felt the same emotional highs and lows at Roman chariot races, Han dynasty Cuju 蹴鞠, Aztec ball games, Mongolian Naadam, medieval jousts, and Japanese sumo. Even for non-sports fans, I’d encourage you to once in your life try to go in person to a playoff game where tens of thousands are living and dying with every play.
Oh, and Josh Hart brings the energy and JB the crafty brilliance that America is sorely lacking when it comes to US-China competition.
HeyTea
HeyTea, the greatest milk tea brand on the planet, finally made it to NYC. While its Times Square menu is limited relative to its Chinese branches, its grape and mango drinks are on my regular rotation.
The following is a personal essay by Yuhao Roger Yang, a policy analyst, that showcases the remarkable journey of a Chinese consumer brand from a small tier-3 city onto the global stage. It initially appeared in the fantastic Following the Yuan Substack.
In December 2023, HeyTea 喜茶 quietly opened its first New York City store on Broadway in midtown Manhattan. As with their every new city debut, hour-long lines formed — a scene familiar from London to Singapore.
Despite its recent financing struggle, as one of the earliest VC-backed, high-end milk tea brand with a national presence, it has been seen as the role model by a generation of beverage chains, including its latest challengers Naixue 奈雪 (HK:2150), Chagee 霸王茶姬, Mixue Ice Cream & Tea 蜜雪 (applied for HK IPO in January), and Chabaidao 茶百道 (HK:2555); and it started in a small town you’ve probably never heard of.
I was an early supporter of HeyTea in its birthplace Jiangmen 江门, Guangdong province, which is also my hometown. When I had my first sip twelve years ago, as they just opened, I had “no idea, no dream, no fantasies” about their meteoric rise later in life, similar to how the first DJ in Pennsylvania who gave Taylor Swift a chance on the radio must have felt. Witnessing HeyTea’s journey from a local favorite to a celebrated success fills me with immense pride.
How it won my heart
The first HeyTea shop was opened in 2012 in Jiangbianli Alley 江边里 in the old part of the city by “Neo” Nie Yunchen 聂云宸, then a twenty-year-old failed phone repair shop owner.
Jiangbianli Alley was our own teenage rom-com set: we’d go there for first dates with our high school sweethearts, boba in hand, the sweet milky smell of drinks mingling with the thrills of new crushes and nervous energy of young love.
Before HeyTea opened doors, it was already the go-to place for trendy Taiwanese-style boba shops like Gong Cha 貢茶 and Sadou. But everyone was tight on money in a small town (where the average disposable income is half of nearby tier-1 cities like Shenzhen), so HeyTea had to be, and was, extraordinary for us to pay a premium. And it was.
Almost all the media coverage I read missed the key to HeyTea’s rise in its early days: high schoolers. We were their fuel — spreading the word, organizing group orders, turning classes and dorms into HeyTea hubs — we were hooked on those sugary bombs, and we were their super fans.
Soon, HeyTea wasn’t just the weekend date spot; it invaded our weekday classrooms. This demand led them to start delivery — probably the first boba shop in Jiangmen to do so, before Meituan 美团 was a thing.
I attended a typical Chinese public boarding high school, where afternoon classes were long and sleep-inducing. We were always in desperate need for a pick-me-up around mid-afternoon.
The British afternoon tea culture evolved into the “3:15 culture” during the colonial era in neighboring Hong Kong. Around 3:15 p.m., workers would enjoy refreshments like sweets, breads, pastries, and milk tea. This habit spread to Guangdong in the 1980s.
Our school cafeteria didn’t offer afternoon tea or desserts. Spotting a market opportunity, the tea shops like HeyTea began delivering to schools to cater to student demands.
But soon, HeyTea got so popular that they stopped deliveries to individuals, demanding a twenty-cup minimum. With forty to fifty students crammed into a typical Chinese high school classroom, we were the ideal bulk-order crowd.
Lectures turned into tea-order ops. In a typical operation, the HeyTea menu would travel from desk to desk during lectures, right under the teacher’s nose. I’d collect orders on scraps of paper, then sneak off for “bathroom breaks” to furiously phone it all in.
Acting as the representative for my classroom, I would consolidate everyone’s tea orders and distribute them once they arrived. This not only provided a much-needed afternoon refreshment, but also made me quite popular among my peers.
My grades suffered. Instead of listening to lessons, I was the mastermind behind the first “group buying” craze — long before Pinduoduo or Temu — becoming my class’s unofficial HeyTea king.
Thanks to students like me, HeyTea conquered every class in my school, then every school in our city.
How it won China’s heart
Nie’s idea was simple yet revolutionary: ditch the artificial milk tea powders that were the norm pre-2010 and use real, high-quality ingredients, which gave consumers an upgrade of experience. For example, the now-iconic “Cheese-Capped Tea” was created by HeyTea around 2012.
In the early 2010s, at HeyTea’s Jiangbianli founding store, I tasted my first-ever milk tea made with Japanese probiotic drink Yakult (which is worthy of its own story) and fresh mangoes.
Sure, the drinks tasted amazing, but their success wasn’t just about the product. They understood us — young, social media-savvy, and hungry for something different.
It’s a little cringey to think about it now, but the only reason we bought HeyTea was to post a photo on Sina Weibo for likes. We thought we were the coolest kids with their latest iteration of drinks.
Fast forward a few years, as students from Jiangmen went to college in other cities in Guangdong, they brought HeyTea with them. This helped HeyTea to establish a reputation outside of Jiangmen for the first time.
Then in 2016, investors, including He Boquan 何伯权 (a beverage tycoon), IDG Capital, and funds under Meituan, saw HeyTea’s potential and invested in the company. This allowed HeyTea to expand rapidly and open stores in major cities across China, reshaping China’s entire food and beverage industry. It has gone through five rounds of investment so far, with a reported 60 billion RMB valuation.
By now, Nie amassed an estimated net worth of US$1.24 billion, making him the youngest self-made billionaire, according to Hurun 胡润.
HeyTea’s growth in China’s big cities, however, has plateaued in recent years, and the record-breaking valuation may have become a burden for IPO.
To maintain control over product quality, Nie once insisted on operating all stores directly, rejecting the franchise model, even at the risk of slow growth or failure.
But now, he started to allow franchising for overseas expansion and (lower-tier) market penetration. Still, franchisees must have substantial self-made funds of at least 700,000 RMB and work at HeyTea for at least three months. Before global chains like KFC and Starbucks started doing so, the brand opened stores in smaller cities and offered nearly a 50% price drop across all stores.
Earlier this year, I made a pilgrimage to HeyTea’s original site in Jiangbianli Alley, which remains a breeding ground for innovative beverage startups. Just a few yards away, Shao Ning 烧柠 began with its roasted lemon tea and now boasts around 200 stores after founding in 2019. Opposite, Sooogood entices with teas packed with fruit. More recently, nearby Double Cup’s cocoa boba has gained traction and opened several new locations in town. The alley also hosts unique independent coffee shops.
HeyTea’s story is not just about milk tea. It is a testament to the power of small-town dreams, savvy marketing, and a relentless pursuit of quality. It’s a reminder that the next game-changing idea in China might be brewing just around the corner, waiting to be discovered.
Also, my hometown’s story does not end with HeyTea or the wider tea category; it is now a testing ground for coffee.
Jiangmen has a unique coffee history dating back to the 1860s, thanks to its immigrant population. This led to early adoption among traditionally tea-drinking residents in the late nineteenth century. A surge of diasporic investment in the 1980s propelled production, and as a result, Jiangmen now exports 20% of China’s roasted beans, supplying major cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong.
The city’s coffee scene is booming, with nearly 1,800 cafes (496 opened in 2023 alone) — will the next coffee giant come from here? Moreover, if Jiangmen can reinvent itself from a manufacturing hub to a beverage trendsetter, what other hidden gems lie waiting in China’s smaller cities?
Weibo Doom Scroll Covers a Real-Life Harem
Xu Bo 徐波 is the founder of the gaming company Duoyi 多益, worth a supposed 27 billion RMB. He’s mostly famous on the internet for the life goal he’s set for himself — he’s going to have 100 sons. He does this by operating a very popular Weibo account with a pinned post looking for twenty-one-year-old pretty, virginal girls to have babies with. I’m not entirely sure how many girls have taken him up on the offer, but he has thirteen boys now through various means (IVF, surrogacy, etc.).
From what I can tell, he has a rotating harem of different virginal girls cycling through his life — but among all of them, he’s the happiest with Yang, nickname “二妞妈” (mother to his second daughter, literally). He’s the typical sort of misogynistic man, and Yang was smart enough to play directly into his ideals. She was never jealous of his other girlfriends, even to the point that she’s willing to hold hands with them in bed and chat. She took care of all dozen of his children. She never spent his money, which he only ever gave to her after noting it’s a “loan” on the transfer note. She never talks to other men. He was so confident in her chastity, that he offered to give 10 million RMB to any man who could get her to go out to dinner with them. She wrote a will that if she died, everything she owned would go to Xu Bo, not even leaving her own parents any money. She even didn’t mind that he had no intention of marrying her, in case she absconded with his money.
Which is exactly what she proceeded to do — abscond away to Japan, abandoning the thirteen children that were left in her care, with 800 million RMB of his money. He freaked out and immediately sued, but the courts ruled that they had lived together for so long and she’s been stepmom to his children for so long that what they have counts as a “civil marriage,” and so they ordered her to return 500 million of the money, and she got to keep the rest.
And Xu Bo has been making a flood of posts accusing her of being a bad mom, a bad wife, flirting with three men at once, not caring about her children (only two of whom are biologically hers), and even banning his company employees from marrying any woman who wants more than 100k in bride price.
I swear, every other post today has been various bloggers posting their takes on this development. I’ll cover a couple of the most popular or controversial takes, since this is the only thing anyone’s talking about.
First, from a technology blogger:
The case of Xu Bo’s girlfriend taking his 300 million is a classic case of morality. That is, both sides have a case. On the one hand, when a girl serves a billionaire for that many years with no title, no legitimacy, taking care of all of his children, getting some money out of it doesn’t seem entirely unfair. On the other hand, if people see that you can get 300 million RMB by being some billionaire’s mistress, what would society become?
This is the trouble with morality cases. Think about it: this is such an eye-grabbing piece of news — why is no reporter from a proper media agency covering it? Is it because they don’t want to? It’s because they don’t know how to.
To put it simply, this case isn’t about how Xu Bo’s legal team is incompetent. And the woman here didn’t get to keep 300 million because she found some legal loophole. To put it more simply, if your coworker said he had some kind of emergency and needed to borrow 300k from you, and you wire him the money and make a note that it’s a loan, and demand he pay it back in six months. And the judge says, “Nah, you don’t have a contract specifying it’s a loan so you don’t get the money back”?
No, in this case, the judge took one of Xu Bo’s many girlfriends to be his long-term life partner, and he took this 300 million to be a normal part of a gift between a couple. That’s how she got to legally keep this money.
This is a ruling on behalf of “morality.”
So why is it so controversial?
Because morality has to do with what we want to encourage in society. Tell the public, do you think it’s okay to encourage girls to be mistresses to billionaires?
This girl is just one of Xu Bo’s many mistresses. She’s just the main one who manages his harem. After gaining his trust, she took 300 million from him, and because they lived together for a long time, the judge ruled in her favor.
Once the public sees this case, what are they going to take away about relationships?
Like, oh, it’s not such a bad deal to be a mistress. Look, Xu Bo’s mistress got 300 million entirely legally.
That’s what’s hard about morality cases. Both sides have a point. And you have to rule in such a way that you help direct public morality. You can view the girl involved here as the victim having to put up with humiliation and stress for years, and support her getting her money. You can view her as just another gold digger who managed to con a billionaire into giving her 300 million.
These two different mindsets have drastically different effects on society.
The second take is from an illustrator:
Just saw Xu Bo refusing to admit that Yang didn’t love him. He thinks she left because she was “brainwashed by feminism.” It reminds me of a lot of people…
I feel like a lot of men, especially the older ones, really do think of themselves as a patriarch in an intimate relationship. They treat their wives just like they treat their children.
And they don’t allow anything that’s outside of the realm of their imagination to happen. They seriously imagine women as an extension of themselves. For them, women are supposed to spend their whole lives serving their family, serving their husband and children. It’s not possible for them to think about anything else. No, it’s not that they shouldn’t — it’s that it’s not possible for them to.
So they can’t understand women falling out of love, because that’s not a problem for them. It’s not like men get married because of love.
I’ve seen a lot of cases among older people, where the woman wants a divorce, and the guy just thinks it’s inconceivable, unbelievable. Why divorce? We’ve been together for so many years, don’t talk to me about love. Why can’t we just keep going and you keep supporting me? Isn’t that what women are supposed to do? Why are you fucking around outside all day? Wouldn’t people make fun of you? How are you going to support yourself? What can you do by yourself? What can you do?
I saw the roadtripper Auntie Su Min 苏敏. When she went back for a divorce, her husband never thought that that’s what she came back for. He assumed she’d come back because she couldn’t make it outside and came back begging to continue serving him. As soon as he saw her, he immediately went, “Oh, so you know to come back!? Couldn’t make it on your own, huh?”
That’s how men think.
They’re everyone’s dad. They’re everyone’s god. They see intimate relationships as relationships of power. They think they’re the smartest, wisest, most capable around.
“How could you possibly leave me? How are you going to survive by yourself? I don’t know anything about love. I just know that your only option is to stay home and serve me and beg me and call me daddy…”
Even if you are determined to leave, he still thinks you’re just throwing a tantrum. You’re just another Lu Yiping who has to come back for money even if it means being whipped. [segment from old TV show]
“All right — go, then. The outside world is dangerous. Once you go out there and get beaten up by society, you’ll come back crying for daddy.”
That’s how men think.
Another take from an author:
I see a lot of people not understanding this piece of gossip, so let me write up a little PSA on Xu Bo here.
Xu Bo is one of my favorite modern male postmodern performing artists, the leader of Chinese farm feminism. He obtained a large amount of wealth through unspeakable means that is definitely not running his company, and went about trying to achieve the dream of all Chinese men: “Build a harem of virgins, have a ton of sons.”
Yang was a “girlfriend” who came to his side in the early stages of his experiment, and got his praise for never fighting or getting jealous. (I need to emphasize here that Xu Bo doesn’t marry anyone. He just fills his house with “girlfriends” to protect his assets.) At the time, Xu Bo was still having children by traditional means, and had two kids with Yang.
Xu Bo’s experiment got the attention and support of countless men online, but at the same time, he screwed himself with what he said. “Men should give 20,000 RMB to their wife every month for household expenses.” “Low-income men should give 98% of their income to their wife for household expenses.” He’s exposed himself as a secret feminist, and most of his male fans freaked out and left.
His account fell by the wayside and was silent for many years. The next time he resurfaced, his experimental method had changed. Maybe he’s reached that age. He just can’t do it anymore. So Xu Bo’s stopped searching for “girlfriends,” and instead for surrogates.
In this period, Xu Bo’s created dozens of new children, raised in a daycare-like environment, taken care of by his “girlfriend” or nannies. The eggs come from all kinds of different country, ethnicities, and skin colors, but the sperm all come from Xu Bo. He’s a reproduction freak, not a retard. From the videos he’s posted, it’s almost all boys.
Xu Bo took advantage of overseas laws and tried to use “sperm donation” to make sure that none of his estate would be divided by his nearly 100 children. He said himself that the reason he had so many kids is to make his inheritors fight and compete against each other. The best will inherit his estate, and the rest can go work in a sweatshop.
Right now, I don’t think this case is about “Yang’s betrayal” at all, because 1) Xu Bo has a real victim complex, and 2) he loves talking about his personal life on the internet.
Speaking of Xu Bo’s tendency to spin the story to his favor, there was a trending hashtag last year of a guy who went to a job interview at Duoyi, and was refused the opportunity because he was twenty pounds heavier than his resume said.
The guy got upset and went to get an explanation from Duoyi with his mom. And Xu Bo used his official Duoyi Network account to expose a photo of this guy’s mom, ranting about how, “Don’t get yourself taken hostage by a feminazi.”
All the men down in his comment section didn’t realize the fat guy involved here was a man, so they followed him with a bunch of comments like, “Feminazis shouldn’t get hired.” “Hamplanet,” etc.
And finally, from a technology blogger:
Dude, we are just getting started. If we’re in an eighty-eight-episode-long TV show, we’re only at the first mini climax. We haven’t even reached the proper plotline yet.
Xu Bo is still in the prime of his youth right now, and he’s already unable to handle a single past girlfriend. In another twenty to thirty years, when he’s old and frail and facing off against his 100 children, can you imagine how thrilling that’ll get?
Forget the War of the Nine Dragons [historical case of nine princes all going after the throne]. This is going to be full-on Battle Royale.
So, we all need to take care of ourselves, so we can follow this billionaire drama to the end!
I look forward to it so much!
Xu Bo! Good luck!
Seriously, where else can you get this content?
BIS—Congress Cheaps Out on AI Security, Putting US at Risk
Jack Titus (LinkedIn) is a Fellow in the Technology & Innovation team at the Federation of American Scientists.
As Congress finalized appropriations for FY 2024, several agencies critical to American competitiveness and national security saw very difficult funding outcomes. One such agency is the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) — an important but little-known agency tasked with implementing and enforcing the nation’s export controls on key technologies. While they didn’t receive a massive cut the way certain other agencies did, they did receive flat funding — which in practice is a decline in purchasing power, given inflation — and that means another year of being stuck with outdated technology that hampers their productivity in their existing work and exposes their data to cyberattacks from Russia and China.
Such fiscal constraint leaves BIS without sufficient resources to do its job well, let alone enforce new monitoring and reporting requirements central to the administration's national AI strategy as outlined in the AI EO. For a country that prides itself on its technology leadership and innovation culture, it’s ironic that current and former BIS staff state that “major government databases that they use to monitor trade flows and identify suspicious activity can perform only a fraction of the needed functionality and crash routinely.” It’s the equivalent of showing up to a gunfight with a toothbrush and a broken stick.
But all is not lost. This fight has several rounds to go and Congress has the opportunity to right this trend starting this year, as it works on appropriations for the next fiscal year.
In BIS’s FY25 budget justification — which calls for a $32 million increase to its budget — the agency clearly lays out that without the requested funding increase it will have to make difficult choices on which of its mission requirements would receive enough money to be successfully implemented. Giving BIS what it needs should be a no-brainer, for no other reason than it represents billions of dollars in return on investment. A relatively modest increase in funding for BIS would be vastly outweighed by the strategic value of empowering the agency to effectively enforce export controls that protect America’s technological lead and national security advantages over rivals like China, representing billions in potential losses avoided through the protection of valuable intellectual property and prevention of technological transfers benefiting adversaries.
In a time of global tech competition, BIS’s role has expanded as policymakers place increasing demands upon it. For example, over the last two years, BIS has issued and expanded semiconductor export controls restricting China’s access to key AI-related chips and equipment. These controls are designed to limit China’s ability to access and develop the cutting-edge chips it requires for military applications, facial recognition, and frontier AI systems. BIS continues to update these controls to close loopholes, including Chinese firm Huawei’s use of technology from two US companies in developing its most advanced chips yet. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who oversees BIS, wants to use export controls to “ensure that China can’t use American chip and AI technologies for its military.”
BIS’s responsibilities regarding AI grew with Biden’s AI EO, which empowers the agency to compel companies to share details about their advanced AI work — model architectures, computing power utilized, cybersecurity practices, vulnerability testing results, and more. For the first time, the government will have visibility into this cutting-edge frontier as AI capabilities rapidly progress. Oversight is critical as systems grow increasingly powerful in open-ended tasks like generating human-like text, editing video, and coding software. While not presenting catastrophic risks today, AI’s novel capabilities demand proactive governance to foster innovation responsibly alongside upholding America’s democratic values. And such governance takes resources.
Unfortunately, BIS has not gotten the resources it needs to do this job. According to a 2022 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), “the budget of BIS has not increased commensurate with the increased number of export-controlled items, the evolving threat landscape, and the growing pressure from an increasingly sophisticated evasion regime.” Given the crucial AI-related responsibilities BIS has taken on in the last two years, it’s clear that the agency needs more resources to step up to the task. Bipartisan majorities in Congress have consistently backed using export control authorities as critical implements of national power in terms of strategic competition with Russia and China. Now lawmakers need to put their money where their mouth is.
[Jordan: this paragraph from Sam Hammond and Erich Grunewald’s recent take on the subject is just brutal]
Funding constraints hurt all the more given the unusual range of skills BIS analysts need to do their job effectively. Crafting sensible controls on AI chips demands staff with deep technical knowledge of the semiconductor supply chain, for example. Enforcing the chip controls, meanwhile, demands both expertise in China’s economy and the strategic acumen to play a continual game of cat and mouse. Yet according to a report from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as of last year, the BIS had only one in-house Mandarin speaker (recently upgraded to two), and at one point “only employed one member of staff who could maintain and operate the Federal Register system.”
So clearly, an additional $32 million in funding for BIS is a great start. These additional funds would allow BIS to strengthen export control enforcement efforts, better identify emerging technologies warranting export restrictions, assess the impact of existing controls, and more. However, it’s nowhere near enough. In 2022, the abovementioned CSIS report recommended an additional $44.6 million in annual funding, which would be enough to support new technology and staff for BIS analytical capabilities and add new positions to the Export Enforcement team. Since then BIS has only had more job responsibilities added on. The return on investment for our national security would be several times the cost of these interventions. It would be prudent for Congress to correct its mistakes and invest in American national security, and it should start with BIS.