For years regulators in Washington have been trying to gain access to the books of Chinese companies listed in America, to ensure they are in good order. Their counterparts in Beijing have refused, invoking vague national-security considerations. This summer it seemed as though Chinese firms with nearly $1trn-worth of shares traded in America would be forced to delist from American bourses as a result of the stalemate. On December 15th America’s auditing regulator announced a breakthrough: its team has been allowed to conduct inspections in Hong Kong.
The beancounters’ success belies a bilateral commercial relationship that is getting increasingly tetchy. On the day of their announcement, America’s Commerce Department said it had added 36 Chinese companies to its “entity list”, a designation that makes doing business with them near-impossible. The previous day a bipartisan group of lawmakers in Congress proposed a ban on TikTok, a Chinese-linked social-media platform with 100m American users. The day before that, Democratic and Republican senators introduced a bill that, if passed, would add Huawei and other Chinese telecoms companies to another list, maintained by the Treasury, of “specially designated nationals”. This would deny them access to American banks, in effect freezing them out of the global financial system.