New U.S. China trade plan leaves industry hungry for specifics
Send a link to a friend
[October 05, 2021] By
David Lawder and Andrea Shalal
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Having waited eight
months for U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai's promised
"top-to-bottom" policy review of trade with China, some U.S. industries
and experts were complaining over the plan's lack of specifics on
negotiations or timing.
Unveiling her plan on Monday, Tai, President Joe Biden's top trade
official, pledged to hold talks with Chinese officials over their
failure to meet the terms of former President Donald Trump's "Phase 1"
trade deal, and to revive a process to grant exclusions from tariffs on
Chinese imports.
"She's going to re-engage with China and that's a good thing," said Mary
Lovely, a Syracuse University trade economist who attended Tai's speech
in Washington. "But her whole plan seems to be, 'I'm going to have a
conversation.'"
Tai will leave in place most of Trump's controversial tariffs on
hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods as she launches
discussions with her counterpart, Chinese Vice Premier Liu He. She will
raise U.S. concerns about China's industrial subsidies, but did not
outline specific plans to tackle Beijing's policies that the U.S.
believes undermine free trade.
What happens next "depends on how the conversation goes," said Tai, the
former top trade lawyer on the House Ways and Means Committee, who has
promised to center the Biden trade policy around workers.
She was unsparing in her criticism of Beijing on this front, accusing
China's Communist Party government of continuing to "shape its economy
to the will of the state, hurting the interests of workers here in the
U.S. and around the world."
Tai's speech, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
think tank, won support from Democratic lawmakers, unions as well as a
former Trump administration trade official.
"What you saw today is more evidence that there's strong bipartisan
concern about the direction of our economic relationship with China,"
Stephen Vaughn, a former top USTR official under Trump who helped to
develop the original "Section 301" investigation that led to U.S.
tariffs on Chinese goods.
NEW TARIFF WORRIES
However, industries that have suffered through more than three years
worth of U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports that cost billions of dollars,
were hoping for details on which products might win tariff relief.
[to top of second column] |
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai testifies before the Senate
Finance Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., May 12, 2021.
Pete Marovich/Pool via REUTERS
Instead, Monday's speech left lingering concerns that Tai could launch new
tariff actions after saying she will keep further "Section 301" investigations
as options.
The US-China Business Council said it feared tariffs might become permanent,
given the lack of any clear road map. The National Foreign Trade Council called
for a "robust" tariff exclusion process to provide some relief for companies
hammered by the U.S.-China trade war.
"Today’s long-awaited announcement proved the Biden administration’s trade
strategy on China to be lackluster at most, and will further inflict unnecessary
damage to the American economy and retail supply chains," said David French,
senior vice president of the National Retail Federation.
Tai said she would refrain from Trump's plans for a separate formal "Phase 2"
negotiations with Beijing over structural issues such as China's massive
subsidies to state enterprises, citing a "disinclination" to use the Trump
administration's labels.
How those discussions unfold depends in part on "how much traction we get with
China and to what degree we have to take our own measures to defend our
interests," Tai said.
The United States pursued regular high-level economic dialogues with China for
more than a decade until 2017 that produced little change in Beijing's policies.
The Trump administration's Phase One deal was heralded as a breakthrough, but
Beijing has fallen far short of commitments to buy U.S. goods.
Tai's speech "didn't give us new goals, or new tools," said Derek Scissors, a
China scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
"You say we have to have a worker-centric trade policy, and we can't tolerate
the Chinese behaving like this anymore because it harms America, but we're going
to talk to them about it," Scissors said. "When has that ever worked?"
(Reporting by David Lawder, Andrea Shalal and Michael Martina; Editing by
Heather Timmons & Simon Cameron-Moore)
[© 2021 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2021 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Thompson Reuters is solely responsible for this content.
|