Shannon Brandao
From the article: "🤓🇺🇲🇨🇳 Repealing #China’s Permanent Normal #Trade Relations status looks like the US' next big #decoupling move.
On Tuesday, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party released a far-reaching document outlining nearly 150 steps that the US could take to address a '"multidecade campaign of economic aggression,"' New York Times staff said, citing language in the report.
'They ranged from imposing new tariffs on older types of Chinese chips to further cutting off the flow of capital and technology between the world’s largest economies. Among the report’s other recommendations were requiring that publicly traded American companies disclose ties to China and investing further in U.S. research and manufacturing capacity to counter China’s dominance of sectors like pharmaceuticals and critical minerals.'
While many of the committee's recommendations had broad support, the proposal to end China’s normal trade status immediately met pushback from influential groups tied to 'farm district Republicans and agricultural lobbies,' Politico staff noted. A few Democrats also rejected the language.
'The pushback among Democrats and farm state Republicans was so intense that Krishnamoorthi, the lead Democrat on the committee, argued that the panel was not actually recommending a repeal of China’s normal trade status, despite the report’s explicit recommendation to rethink tariffs on China. . . . Instead, he and [Rep. Mike] Gallagher said, the report recommends devising a new tariff structure for China that would allow lawmakers to vote each year on tariff levels for a variety of goods.'
But the end result would be no different.
'The lawmakers, including ag district Republicans Dusty Johnson of South Dakota and Darin LaHood of Illinois, along with Democrats Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts and Ritchie Torres of New York, managed to secure small changes to the trade language, which essentially made it palatable enough for some, though not all, of its critics,' Politico said.
Torres subsequently told reporters that he and the proposal's other opponents 'did our best to moderate the language, to water down the language. But it remains alarmingly vague.'
According to the Times, '[r]eaching consensus' on every item in the report 'required months' of bipartisan negotiations, with '[o]nly one member of the 24-person committee' voting against the final version.
Rep. Krishnamoorthi told reporters after that China’s Communist Party assumes the US is too 'divided' and 'tribal' to 'deal with challenges.'
'On this particular issue of competition between the United States and the C.C.P., we are of one mind,' he said."
#news #business #geopolitics
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Sources:
"Lawmakers Call for Raising Tariffs and Severing Economic Ties With China" https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/12/business/economy/us-china.html
"Who reined in the China committee’s trade-war proposal?"
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/13/agriculture-lawmakers-lobbyists-quietly-challenge-china-hawks-on-trade-00131451
House Committee's report:
"STRATEGIC COMPETITION BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY: RESET, PREVENT, BUILD: A Strategy to Win America's Economic Competition with the Chinese Communist Party"
https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/reset-prevent-build-scc-report.pdf