Efforts to ease tensions between the United States and China by way of a series of diplomatic visits to Beijing could possibly be undermined because the White House presses forward with plans to impose new restrictions on American investments in Chinese firms concerned in quantum computing, synthetic intelligence and semiconductors.

The looming restrictions have been a central matter of dialogue between Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and senior Chinese officers during her four-day trip to China, which concluded on Sunday.

The Treasury Department has sought to slim the scope of the restrictions, which goal personal fairness and enterprise capital funding in a couple of restricted — however extremely strategic — sectors. The division has additionally tried to ease considerations inside China that the measures quantity to a expertise blockade supposed to wreck the Chinese financial system.

Still, any such actions are anticipated to anger China and would be the first check of the brand new channels of communication that the world’s two largest economies try to revive.

“They’re going to have concerns about our investment policies toward China,” mentioned Mark Sobel, a former longtime Treasury Department official who’s now the U.S. chairman of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum. “The Chinese have their issues with us, and both sides have a pretty clear understanding that there’s tension.”

U.S.-Chinese relations have just lately been pushed to their weakest level in years. Tensions have flared over the flight of a Chinese surveillance balloon over the United States, harder restrictions on expertise from Washington, Beijing’s partnership with Moscow through the conflict in Ukraine and China’s continued threatening of Taiwan.

In latest months, the Biden administration has been working to halt an extra decline within the relationship, which it sees as a possible risk to world peace and stability. In addition to Ms. Yellen, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken visited Beijing final month and John Kerry, President Biden’s particular envoy for local weather change, is heading there on Sunday.

But new funding restrictions from the United States might escalate the tit-for-tat measures that the 2 nations have been deploying simply as they’re making an attempt to set a “floor” underneath their relationship.

The new measures appear to have been largely settled for a lot of months now. But the Biden administration seems to have delayed asserting them given the tumultuous relationship with China. Some of the small print additionally proceed to be debated by U.S. authorities companies. Once the restrictions are proposed, the personal sector may have time to touch upon the bounds, which might form how they’re put in place.

Even if the Biden administration decides to carry off additional on issuing the measures, it can face mounting strain from lawmakers, who’re contemplating their very own broader restrictions on investments made in China.

Lawmakers and different supporters of the measures have complained that the present system permits American capital to stream to China and finance applied sciences which will in the end pose a risk to U.S. nationwide safety. The United States already prohibits U.S. companies from instantly promoting sure superior applied sciences to China, and monitors the investments that Chinese firms make in America for potential safety dangers. But the U.S. authorities has little perception into and no management over cash touring from the United States to China.

“China has harnessed, directed and manipulated Western greed to advance its strategic aims to an unprecedented, perilous degree,” Roger W. Robinson Jr., a former chairman of the congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, testified in May throughout a House listening to.

Members of the Biden administration spent a lot of final 12 months weighing how broadly to use funding restrictions, with officers reaching out to enterprise executives to get their views on the affect that such a transfer might need. Industry teams and enterprise capitalists lobbied aggressively towards a broad ban on funding in China, saying it might be disruptive to necessary enterprise relationships and in the end hurt the U.S. financial system.

The administration seems to have landed on a narrowly tailor-made measure, which might require firms to report extra info to the federal government about their deliberate investments in China, whereas prohibiting investments in a couple of delicate areas with navy or surveillance applications.

In a May listening to earlier than the Senate Banking Committee, Paul Rosen, the assistant secretary of the Treasury for funding safety, mentioned the administration was “working to craft a narrow and focused program” to limit funding in sure delicate applied sciences with nationwide safety implications.

Both supporters and critics acknowledge that the measure’s largest significance is what it might imply for future regulation. They say the brand new guidelines themselves are unlikely to do a lot within the brief time period to have an effect on China’s expertise improvement, for the reason that nation has no scarcity of funding funding.

Nicholas R. Lardy, a nonresident senior fellow on the Peterson Institute for International Economics, mentioned the United States was the supply of lower than 5 p.c of China’s inbound direct funding in each 2021 and 2022. In the primary quarter of this 12 months, funding in China by U.S. enterprise capital and personal fairness corporations collapsed to roughly $400 million, down from a peak of roughly $35 billion in 2021, Mr. Lardy mentioned.

But complete home funding in China within the quarter was $1.5 trillion, he mentioned, including that U.S. enterprise capital and personal fairness flows “are not even a rounding error.”

Still, the brand new guidelines might show vital by setting a precedent for the restriction of private-sector funding in China. They could possibly be a instrument that U.S. officers flip to in instances of rigidity with China, and a coverage method that may cascade by way of the superior democracies within the years to come back.

In Group of seven conferences in May, U.S. officers mentioned the opportunity of aligning such insurance policies with shut allies. A report revealed this 12 months by the Center for Strategic & International Studies famous that South Korea and Taiwan each had their very own units of funding restrictions. Taiwan’s guidelines place particular laws on outbound investments in China primarily based on the kind of expertise and embrace prohibitions for high-tech sectors.

China put in place its personal limits on outbound investments in 2016. Beijing steered the nation’s firms and households away from speculating on American actual property and even soccer golf equipment and pushed them as a substitute to purchase abroad companies in plane manufacturing, heavy manufacturing, synthetic intelligence, cybersecurity and different strategic sectors.

The Treasury Department would most possible be the federal government company accountable for finishing up the brand new restrictions. Ms. Yellen has been cautious that if they’re poorly devised, they might undermine the historically open funding local weather within the United States.

“I explained that President Biden is examining potential controls on outbound investment in certain very narrow high-technology areas, and that if we go forward with these, that they will be indeed very narrowly targeted,” Ms. Yellen mentioned on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. She added that the controls “should not be something that will have a significant impact on the investment climate between our two countries.”

A senior Treasury Department official mentioned that Chinese officers had heard the justification supplied by the United States for the attainable restrictions however that it was not clear in the event that they agreed with the rationale.

Chinese officers are additionally watching warily for the Biden administration to situation quite a lot of export restrictions on the kind of superior chips that may be despatched to China. The administration is mulling new measures that would step up restrictions on the flexibility of Chinese firms to achieve entry to cutting-edge synthetic intelligence capabilities via cloud services. Restrictions issued last October stopped Chinese firms from buying such merchandise instantly.

Despite such broad areas of disagreement, Mr. Sobel, the previous Treasury Department official, instructed that the United States and China nonetheless had little alternative however to maintain speaking to one another.

“We’re in the boat together, and that means they just have to talk and get along — whether they’re happy with each other or not,” he mentioned.

Keith Bradsher contributed reporting.