China

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative will soon launch an exclusion process for a third set of Section 301 tariffs on Chinese goods, USTR Robert Lighthizer told Congress this week.

The South Carolina Republican told Inside U.S. Trade “we will see what happens by the end of the week,” adding, “I am cautiously optimistic.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday pledged to enact a range of economic reforms, including expanded market access, better cooperation on intellectual property protection, increased importation of goods and services and the implementation of “opening-up-related policies.”

A possible “snap-back” tariff enforcement mechanism in a U.S.-China trade agreement is raising red flags among analysts who question whether it would spark retaliatory moves that could undercut the deal – and whether it would run afoul of World Trade Organization rules.

Unilateral trade actions taken by the United States are pushing the European Union and China close together and preventing the U.S. and Brussels from coordinating action to confront illicit Chinese trade practices, several trade analysts said on Tuesday.

A World Trade Organization dispute settlement panel this week handed the United States a victory over China by finding that Beijing was improperly administering rice, corn and wheat tariff-rate quotas, which in some cases contributed to the quotas' going unfilled.

Sens. Cardin, Sullivan and others say the bill would help eliminate “the shadow of unfair trade practices by China that likely have hampered the emergence of a Mongolian garment industry.”

“People have explanations – ‘well, they just want to use their leverage’ and this and that – but the Chinese enjoyed it, a lot, because they knew what the opportunity was and they saw that it was a missed one.”

“Establish a system to return the billions of dollars in added tariffs Americans consumers have paid to the Treasury Department’s general fund over the course of the trade war.”