Donald Trump is promising to turn Washington upside down and defy the foreign policy status quo when he returns to the White House in January — but on one controversial issue, he’ll find plenty of bipartisan support.
Trump has talked about hiking tariffs on products from China across the board, ending trade benefits that have allowed cheap imports from the country for decades. Trade groups and importers really, really don’t want that: They say it would make their operations more expensive, and those costs would turn into higher prices for American consumers. But influential lawmakers are increasingly supporting Trump’s stance.
The Republican who chairs the House committee on competition with the Chinese government recently introduced a bill to end permanent normal trade relations with China and to hike tariffs, citing concerns about intellectual property theft by Chinese companies. And for the first time, a congressionally mandated bipartisan commission has likewise recommended ending permanent normal trade relations with China altogether.
“China has shown, increasingly in the last several years, a willingness to weaponize supply chains, to double down on their nonmarket economy approaches and their suppression of dissent and human rights,” Michael Wessel, a trade policy expert and member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, told reporters Monday.
“We have to be realistic about China’s attitude and practices,” he said of the commission’s new recommendations to Congress. Wessel isn’t in the tank for Trump: He was appointed to the panel by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and he spent more than two decades before that working for Democratic lawmakers.
Permanent normal trade status “allows China to benefit from the same trade terms as U.S. allies, despite engaging in practices such as intellectual property theft and market manipulation,” the commission wrote in its annual report released Tuesday morning.
Repealing it, the report added, “could reintroduce annual reviews of China’s trade practices, giving the United States more leverage to address unfair trade behaviors.”
It would likely spark a dramatic escalation in tensions between America and China. Congress most recently took a similar step after Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, ending Russia’s permanent normal trade status in retaliation.
Doing the same for China goes beyond the commission’s past advice to simply review the issue. The decision to adopt the new, stricter recommendation was unanimous, according to a spokesperson for the panel.
Kimberly Glas, another member of the commission, sounded optimistic that Congress could actually pass such a bill, despite the fierce business pushback it would inevitably inspire.
“There’s a groundswell to help recalibrate this relationship with China,” she said of the debate on Capitol Hill.
She’s correct that more lawmakers are seeing a need to act.
Rep. Dan Bishop, a North Carolina Republican who has cosponsored a bill to end a different trade benefit for Chinese products, told NOTUS in an interview earlier this year that he used to believe free trade practices would eventually result in fair, mutually beneficial competition.
But he said he now recognizes that “there is no one world government that is going to make China play fair. The only tool to do that is trade.”
The bill Bishop supports, introduced by Oregon Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer, would prevent Chinese companies from using an exception that allows packages valued under $800 to enter America faster, without the same customs fees — or as much scrutiny — as larger shipments. For nearly a decade, America has had one of the most generous such exceptions in the world. It’s been a boon for e-commerce and shipping companies, lobbyists for which have tried for years to stamp out any congressional discussions about changing the rules.
But Chinese fast fashion companies have used that exception to send in huge numbers of small shipments in recent years, raising eyebrows even among lawmakers who helped raise the threshold to $800 in the first place. Human rights groups have also pointed to evidence that at least some of those packages may involve forced labor.
The China commission wants to see that trade benefit rolled back, recommending in its annual report Tuesday that Congress end it for e-commerce products from every country — not just from China. Their reasoning: Chinese companies could easily sidestep a regional ban by routing goods through a different country.
Even if Trump supports that change, and even though lawmakers broadly want to be tougher on China, they may have a hard time passing such policy into law. Corporate lobbying is still a powerful force. Bishop has faced more pushback than he anticipated this year, even though it’s an issue on which many members of Congress ostensibly agree.
“There’s so many things in Congress where they don’t seem willing to take the step that would be the solution,” he said. The bipartisan de minimis bill, he believes, “would be a solution to the problem of American markets supporting forced labor. But somebody obviously doesn’t want to go that path.”
For a brief moment this autumn, it seemed like the House would actually vote on the bill, or something similar. House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a speech in July that when lawmakers returned from their August recess, they would move to “rein in the de minimis privilege” for Chinese goods that had already been targeted by tariffs during Trump’s first term.
Bishop saw that scaled-back approach as “kind of tepid” because it didn’t apply to every shipment from China. But even that bill might have been too controversial: It didn’t make it to the House floor during the GOP conference’s “China week” when Johnson brought several China-related measures to a vote.
The plan to bring it forward held through the summer, until right before Congress came back. According to an email obtained by NOTUS that Johnson’s staff sent to lobbying groups in late August, “de minimis reform” was still on the table for a vote during the early September “China week.” It then disappeared from the schedule without much notice.
Congressional staff and lawmakers told NOTUS at the time that members were simply still trying to find a consensus — and that they were hearing pushback from shipping and e-commerce companies.
A spokesperson for Johnson said the bill could still come up before the end of the year.
“The Speaker is not stopping here and is committed to advancing further China-related legislation on investments and other predatory practices,” the spokesperson told NOTUS when asked about the de minimis bill.
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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.