The Trump administration is looking to widen its trade war with China by restricting Chinese access to US technology, according to reports from the Wall Street Journal and Reuters.

"The Treasury Department is crafting rules that would block firms with at least 25 percent Chinese ownership from buying companies involved in what the White House calls 'industrially significant technology,'" the Wall Street Journal says. A separate proposal would institute beefed-up export controls preventing Chinese companies from buying these technologies from US firms.

The policies could be announced as soon as this week, the Journal says.

The new policies would be in addition to previous Trump administration efforts to limit Chinese access to US technology. The Trump administration has blocked multiple attempts by Chinese companies to buy US semiconductor firms. And earlier this year, the Trump administration imposed a sweeping export ban on Chinese smartphone maker ZTE after ZTE was caught selling US technology to Iran and North Korea—though more recently the administration announced a deal to lift the ban.

This appears to be part of a concerted effort to deny Chinese companies access to US technologies. "A White House briefing by intelligence agencies to cabinet and White House officials in the spring of 2017 on Chinese efforts to obtain US technology through acquisitions, licensing, and theft was especially influential in spurring the new restrictions," sources told the Wall Street Journal.

“We’ve got trillions of dollars seeking our crown jewels of technology,” White House trade adviser Peter Navarro told the Wall Street Journal last week. “There has to be a defense against that.”

While the military benefits of US technology leadership are obvious, efforts to block Chinese access to US technology could backfire. As Vanity Fair's Maya Kosoff points out, there's a danger that the Chinese will react by intensifying their efforts to build home-grown alternatives to US technologies. China already has a wide-ranging initiative called "Made in China 2025" to promote the development of home-grown high-tech industry. If the US government begins systematically blocking Chinese access to US technology, we can expect the Chinese government to accelerate these efforts.

Critics worry that could cause chaos in the global technology sector.

“There's going to be a Chinese standard for their 1.4 billion people and there's going to be a US standard for our 300 and whatever million people,” said Bruce Andrews, a former deputy secretary of Commerce, last week. “Then we're going to compete around the world for the rest of the population to try to get them to buy into one of these two [standards] because Chinese companies and technologies won't be able to enter the US and we won't be able to enter their market."

Update: Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin commented on the Wall Street Journal's report in a Monday tweet: