Companies will continue to see a rise in global scrutiny of foreign direct investments as European countries try to match the U.S.’s investment screening regime, which has set the standard for investment reviews, trade lawyers said. Several countries, including the United Kingdom and Germany, are quickly bolstering their regimes while the U.S. is continuing to expand its jurisdiction to keep China and sanctioned countries from acquiring critical technologies, the lawyers said.

The administration should increase export controls and sanctions pressure on China, place more scrutiny on Chinese foreign direct investment and push for the modernization of multilateral export regimes, the House’s Republican-led China Task Force said in a Sept. 30 report. It urged the administration to act quickly, saying China and other U.S. “adversaries” are flouting international export control laws and undermining U.S. technology industries.

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While it is too soon to tell whether recent U.S. reforms of foreign direct investment screening will prove successful, the regulations introduced novel provisions to incentivize improved global investment screening, according to a former investment screening counsel for the Treasury Department. The Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (see 2001140060) also appears to fill many of the gaps encountered by previous U.S. investment screening efforts, said Anne Salladin, a Hogan Lovells lawyer and former senior counsel to the chairperson of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S.

China’s progress toward its satellite ambitions show the need for stricter export controls, stronger collaboration on those controls with U.S. allies, and more staffing and funding for U.S. enforcement agencies, panelists said during a meeting on U.S. space-related export controls. The discussion, part of a series of panels hosted by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission on April 25, was billed as a conversation on China’s military-civil fusion. Lorand Laskai, a researcher at the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology, presented a dire outlook for the state of U.S.-China commercial space competition, saying China poses a major threat to U.S. export controls.