Ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump ’s Liberation Day tariffs, China has taken the dramatic step of restricting companies from investing in the U.S.

The country’s leading economic planning agency has been instructed to not greenlight the registration and approval of companies that are interested in investing in the U.S., Bloomberg reported on Apr. 2.

China’s pre-emptive step is aimed at gaining an upper hand in the trade negotiations with the Trump administration. It remains to be seen how the White House responds to these decisions.

Trump is set to announce “reciprocal tariffs” on all countries — China, Canada, and Mexico, in particular — on Apr. 2 that the president has dubbed Liberation Day.

Note that the U.S. and China have also been engaged in a chip war for years over the manufacturing and distribution of semiconductor technology. The White House has repeatedly sought to contain the dragon’s access to the U.S.'s advanced chip-making technology. Such restrictions have forced China to advance its own chip-making technology and develop manufacturing capabilities.

Nonetheless, the Bitcoin mining industry in the U.S. is heavily dependent on imports of Chinese-manufactured mining hardware called application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). American restrictions on Chinese ASIC imports have disrupted the supply chain disruptions in the mining industry as U.S.-based miners faced difficulty importing hardware from China.

When China put a blanket ban on crypto mining in 2021, it led to an exodus of mining operations out of the country. Though there is still a significant amount of underground mining operations in the country, the U.S. has emerged as the leading country in Bitcoin mining.