United States Reinstates Tariff Exemptions For 352 Chinese Products

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) announced it will reinstate exemptions from Trump-era Section 301 tariffs for 352 Chinese products. These products had been previously granted waivers, but those waivers expired at the end of 2020.

The agreement makes the exemptions retroactive to October 12, 2021. They will run through December 31, 2022.

The reinstated tariff exclusions cover certain types of machinery, motors, electrical equipment, chemicals, plastics, textiles, automotive parts, and products made from certain industrial metals, including steel and aluminum. These products are all listed in the annex to USTR’s Federal Register notice, available here.

The main consideration USTR took into account when making this decision was whether a product or comparable product was available from sources in the United States and whether there had been global supply chain changes since 2018 when the tariffs originally were implemented.

Read USTR’s full announcement here.

As trade experts at the law firm of White and Case explained, federal lawmakers could go even further. The U.S. Senate has approved a bill that would reinstate all expired Section 301 exclusions and that would require USTR to consider new exclusion requests for any product covered by the Section 301 tariffs. The provision was part of S. 1260, the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act. The House of Representatives omitted the Section 301 provision from its version of the bill since lawmakers there felt that USTR should retain discretion over the Section 301 exclusion process.

The two chambers are expected to form a conference committee that will attempt to reconcile differences between the two bills. The Senate’s Section 301 language is likely to be a point of contention in those talks.

Stay tuned to Connecting the Dots as these negotiations move forward.