Lawmakers Push for Measures to Tackle China’s Evasion of US Tariffs, Other Unfair Trade Practices

March 7, 2025 TruthUSA

The Chinese regime’s ’systematic abuse of U.S. trade laws … represents a clear and urgent threat to American industry and workers,’ lawmakers said.

Lawmakers have reintroduced a bill and urged government departments to step up efforts to tackle China’s unfair trade practices, including the evasion of U.S. tariffs.

Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa), a member of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, on March 5 relaunched a bipartisan bill aimed at creating a task force within the Department of Justice (DOJ) to tackle trade-related crime investigations and cases.

Hinson said at a press conference that the Protecting American Industry and Labor from International Trade Crimes Act would “finally hold China accountable for decades of evading U.S. trade laws through transshipment, duty evasion, and forced labor.”

She said the Act will help “stop these blatant violations and ensure penalties are meaningfully enforced.”

The bill was passed in the House in December 2024 but wasn’t made law by the end of the 118th Congress.

In a March 5 letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Jamieson Greer, the committee called on the department heads to curb China’s tariff evasion through unlawful transshipment via third countries.

Committee Chairman John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) and ranking member Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) urged Greer to launch a USTR investigation on violations by China-based actors.

Since the United States began imposing higher tariffs on Chinese imports in 2018, “An entire industry of PRC logistics companies has emerged,” with logistics brokers boasting of “evading tariffs by sending steel, aluminum products, clothing, and stainless steel sinks, among other goods, through third countries” to the United States and Europe,” the lawmakers pointed out in the letter.

Moolenaar and Krishnamoorthi cited several examples of the transshipment of products from China, including automotive parts, textiles, and cloth hangers, as well as fentanyl precursors, which contributed to tens of thousands of overdose deaths in the United States each year.

In one of the examples, the letter says, Qingdao Sunsong, a high-technology automotive parts company in China, revealed in a public filing that the primary reason it had set up a facility in Thailand was to circumvent higher tariffs on its rubber hose assembly products exported to the United States.

Hinson said at the press conference on Wednesday that Sunsong’s tariff evasion “is not an isolated event, but part of a broader strategy by the CCP to dominate global markets on the backs of American workers, and while perpetrating egregious slave labor violations.”

In January 2024, Mike Gallagher, then-chair of the committee, said in a statement that Sunsong’s actions had already forced one Illinois company to “lay off a quarter of its workforce and threaten to permanently shutter its operations entirely.”

In another example, the letter says all but one U.S. manufacturer of steel hangers had gone bust by 2007 as a result of China’s dumping practice, and after the Department of Commerce imposed antidumping duties on Chinese steel hangers in 2008, Chinese producers “shifted from unfair trade to outright illegal trade—transshipping and circumventing duties to trade enforcement.”

The letter concludes that the Chinese regime’s “systematic abuse of U.S. trade laws and protective mechanisms through transshipment, forced labor, and other illicit trade practices represents a clear and urgent threat to American industry and workers.”

While acknowledging law enforcement’s actions to monitor and uncover these transshipment schemes, the lawmakers said current enforcement efforts “remain insufficient to hold perpetrators accountable and deter future violations of U.S. trade laws,” and called for stronger measures.

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