U.S. Senators Introduce Legislation Taking On China’s Unfair Trade Practices

As Reuters reported, on Feb. 24 a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a bill that would toughen U.S. trade enforcement laws and address the practice of Chinese-supported companies circumventing U.S. trade laws by moving portions of their production to other countries. Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) and Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) are the lead sponsors of the legislation, but more than dozen senators already have signed on to support the bill.

The legislation, called the Leveling the Playing Field 2.0 Act, pushes back against China’s anti-free market practices by providing the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) with additional tools to stop circumvention tactics.

These tools include:

• Establishing the concept of “successive investigations” under antidumping (AD) and countervailing duty (CD) laws. The new AD/CV investigations would improve the effectiveness of the trade remedy law to combat repeat offenders by making it easier for petitioners to bring new cases when production moves to another country;
• Expediting timelines for successive investigations and creating new factors for the International Trade Commission to consider about the relationship between recently completed trade cases and successive trade cases for the same imported product;
• Providing the DOC the authority to apply CVD law to subsidies provided by a government to a company operating in a different country;
• Imposing statutory requirements for anti-circumvention inquiries to clarify the process and timeline; and
• Specifying deadlines for preliminary and final determinations.

Read more about the legislation at this link. Stay tuned to Connecting the Dots as this bill moves through the legislative process on Capitol Hill.