Ex-Boeing Director Nikki Haley Wants U.S. Businesses Out Of China

Former Boeing director and ex-Trump administration official Nikki Haley, who is running for U.S. president, called for U.S. businesses to exit China in a June 27 newspaper op-ed.

“American companies sell billions of dollars worth of goods in the Chinese market, much of it with military application,” she wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “China also forces technology transfer and steals up to $600 billion of American intellectual property every year. I will push American businesses to leave China as completely as possible.”

Haley is a declared candidate for the Republican nomination for the 2024 U.S. presidential race. In March 2020, after Boeing sought a $60 billion bailout bid from Washington at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, she resigned from the board in public disagreement with the request. A former Republican governor of South Carolina, which is Boeing’s second-largest manufacturing center, said at the time that it was not government’s role to guarantee a company’s financial position.

Her latest political stance may put her further at odds with Boeing and U.S. aerospace’s efforts to profit from Chinese demand for airliners, as well as industry’s push in recent decades to deregulate and better export commercial off-the-shelf technology.

“Advanced technology is especially important,” Haley wrote in the op-ed. “The U.S. Commerce Department keeps a detailed list of the most sensitive technologies that are dangerous to export, but companies can still send them to China. In 2022, the Biden administration approved 70% of licenses for exporting controlled technology to China. I will end these exports.”

Haley was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 2017-18 under President Donald Trump and governor of South Carolina in 2011-17. She served on Boeing’s board starting in May 2019 until her resignation.