Major global carmakers are now openly asking Washington to keep Chinese auto and battery companies physically out of the U.S. market, arguing that their own long-term survival is on the line.

In a submission to a U.S. House hearing on Chinese vehicles, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Stellantis and most other major manufacturers, urged both Congress and the Trump administration to block Chinese state-backed firms from building factories in the United States.

China is putting a formal gatekeeper in front of its steel exports, and that is less about paperwork in 2026 than about giving Beijing a strategic lever over a sector that has become both an economic shock absorber at home and a political lightning rod abroad.

From 1 January 2026, exporters of around 300 categories of steel products will have to obtain export licences tied to specific contracts and backed by manufacturers’ quality inspection certificates, the Ministry of Commerce has announced. The measure plugs steel into a broader export-licensing regime that already covers 43 sensitive goods, including wheat, corn, coal and crude oil, and signals that steel is now being treated alongside energy and food as a commodity of strategic concern.

The European Union’s decision to drastically narrow the scope of its flagship sustainability disclosure regime marks a clear inflection point: it lightens the regulatory load on large companies, but at the cost of weakening one of the world’s most ambitious transparency frameworks just as investors and policymakers are trying to steer trillions toward genuine low-carbon and responsible business models.

What has changed is substantial. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), initially conceived to force tens of thousands of large companies to publish detailed, standardised data on their environmental, social and governance performance, will now apply only to a much thinner slice of the corporate universe. Only firms with more than 1,000 employees and at least €450 million in turnover will be required to report, and financial institutions are excluded for now.