‘Communist China is our enemy and we need to wake up and start acting like it,’ Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) says.
WASHINGTON—U.S. lawmakers are introducing legislation that would prohibit American investors from funding companies controlled by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials on the U.S. blacklist.
The legislation, shared with The Epoch Times ahead of its release, would direct the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to add blacklisted Chinese individuals to his department’s Non-SDN Chinese Military-Industrial Complex Companies List (NS-CMIC) within one year of their identification.
“No one working on behalf of the CCP’s military interests should be doing business in this country,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said in a statement to The Epoch Times on May 21.
The NS-CMIC list, managed by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, aims to identify companies linked to the Chinese regime’s military sector.
U.S. investors are restricted from buying or selling securities of the companies on the list.
The lawmakers noted that the list hasn’t been updated since 2021.
The fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act requires the president to submit a report to Congress every two years on any Chinese individuals who could be added to the Treasury’s NS-CMIC list.
Names considered for inclusion would be drawn from other U.S. government lists, including the Department of Commerce’s Entity List and Military End-User List, the Federal Communications Commission’s Covered List, and the Pentagon’s 1260H list, which contains all entities believed to be part of the Chinese military industrial complex.
The president would also review the Department of State’s Uyghur Forced Labor Act Entity List—which identifies businesses U.S. officials believe are involved in the persecution of Uyghurs and other minorities in China’s far-western Xinjiang region—to determine if any individuals should be added to the Treasury’s NS-CMIC list.
If adopted, the Treasury secretary would have up to a year to update the NS-CMIC list after receiving the report.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who’s introducing the legislation along with Scott, said the legislation aims at ensuring Chinese companies are sanctioned “with the urgency America needs to respond.”
She said she’s working with Scott on several efforts to “decouple the U.S. economy from Chinese companies that threaten our national security.”
By Eva Fu and Dorothy Li
