Joe Biden’s Puny China Tariffs Create Serious Loopholes for the CCP

Joe Biden announced this week that he will quadruple tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs), and raise new tariffs on other products such as critical minerals and solar panels. However, most of the new Section 301 Biden tariffs on just $18 billion worth of Chinese imports unsurprisingly create major loopholes to benefit the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) by encouraging them to freely access our market from other countries, and by targeting items that the U.S. is hardly reliant on China for. If Joe Biden were actually tough on China as President Trump is, he would crack down on China’s attempt to begin exporting EVs to the U.S. from countries like Mexico, invoke tariffs on critical minerals the U.S. is actually dependent on China for, and would have never significantly weakened President Trump’s pre-existing tariffs on solar panels, steel, and aluminum.

Joe Biden’s proposal to quadruple President Trump’s Section 301 tariffs on Chinese EVs will do no damage to the Chinese economy because the U.S. doesn’t currently import Chinese EV’s—or Chinese gas-powered vehicles for the most part—thanks to President Trump’s Section 301 tariffs on China invoked in 2018. What Joe Biden willfully neglects is something President Trump immediately raised issue with this past March: China is currently building their EVs in Mexico with the intent of eventually selling them into the U.S. to evade Trump’s pre-existing 25% Chinese automobile tariffs. China is utilizing a crafty tactic called “country hopping,” which is when a country strategically evades tariffs imposed on a particular good by establishing production in a different country where the tariffs are not already applied.

Chinese EVs currently dominate the Mexican and European markets, because of their cheap prices, design, and advanced technology. For example, sales of Chinese cars in Mexico have already increased 63% in 2023, and Chinese EV maker BYD sells its EVs for less than half the price of the cheapest U.S.-made Tesla. A report published by Allianz Travel Insurance estimated that by 2030, Chinese EV manufacturers will cost European manufacturers of EVs $7 billion euros annually in lost profits. The same will happen in the U.S. if we’re not careful. Therefore, as President Trump already announced he will do, if Joe Biden were serious about cracking down on China’s EV monopoly, he would threaten Mexico and every other country with 100% tariffs on any EVs made by Chinese companies imported to the U.S.

On top of this, Biden is raising tariffs on China for natural graphite imports—which gets refined before it is used in EV batteries—and other critical minerals. However, natural graphite will only be subject to Biden’s tariffs in 2026, paving the way for automobile companies and new U.S. graphite refiners to continue to source from China for the next two years. CEO Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Corporation, which manufactures lithium-ion batteries in the U.S. using silicon instead of natural graphite, says that Biden’s two-year delay on natural graphite tariffs discourages U.S. EV manufacturers from investing in newer, more efficient, battery technologies like their own, and does not signal to industry to “get the hell out of Chinese graphite right now, not two years from now or longer."

Additionally, Biden’s tariffs target various critical mineral ores and concentrates that the U.S. does not rely heavily on China for, for example, the ores of aluminum, manganese and chromium. Simultaneously, the Biden tariffs neglect several key minerals and rare earths the United States is completely reliant on China for. For example, we are 100% reliant on China for arsenic, used in the manufacturing of semiconductors and electronics; 100% reliant on China for gallium and 50% reliant on China for germanium, both used in the production of transistors, semiconductors, solar panels, and cells; and lastly, 95% reliant on China for several rare earth elements including yttrium, used to create electronics and defense technologies. All of these elements were left off of Biden’s list.

On top of this, Biden’s large federal loans and subsidies being awarded to domestic critical mineral refineries mean nothing when his Inflation Reduction Act rules allow for consumers of EVs to still benefit from federal tax credits even if they purchase EVs that contain Chinese minerals in them. As Greg Wischer, Founder of Dei Gratia Minerals argues, no one who purchases an EV with Chinese minerals should benefit from thousands of dollars in federal tax credits. And, its no secret that U.S. dependence on Chinese minerals only helps Biden meet his aggressive targets to ban gas cars by 2035.

Joe Biden’s new Section 301 tariffs also target solar panels, after he had suspended President Trump’s Section 201 solar panel tariffs for two years on four CCP-aligned countries. President Trump’s 2018 solar tariffs were invoked on all imported solar cells due to Chinese companies illegally dumping cheap solar panels into our market. In 2022, Joe Biden granted Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam—responsible for 80% of U.S. solar panel supply—a two-year exemption from Trump’s tariffs, despite that they were found by the U.S. Department of Commerce to have allowed Chinese companies to “country hop” production into their countries to start illegally dumping them into the U.S. market again. Biden even vetoed Congress’s bipartisan efforts in 2022 to reverse the exemption. It is no surprise that in 2023, the U.S. solar industry suffered 100 bankruptcies and business closures.

Lastly, Joe Biden has granted repeated exemptions to President Trump’s Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs enabling foreign countries to continue to threaten our national and economic security. For example, the European Union, who President Trump found to have been threatening our national security with excessive imports into our market, was granted an exemption by Biden in 2021 which was then extended again in 2023. Japan, who has a long history of  illegally dumping steel into the U.S. market, was granted a generous tariff-rate quota by Biden in February 2022, allowing them to sell us up to 1.25 million metric tons of steel annually free of charge. As a result of these actions, U.S. iron and steel imports surged far beyond Trump-era levels from $19 billion in 2021 to $45 billion by the end of 2022. Aluminum imports surged from 4.8 million metric tons to 5.6 million metric tons by 2022.

It is evident that Joe Biden dismisses the interests of American workers and is aiming to seize a media opportunity to appear as pro-Buy American and “tough on China” against President Trump as possible during an election year. Sadly, the tariffs that announced strategically have little to no impact on China’s predatory economic practices damaging domestic industry and harming our workers. President Trump is the only Buy American president in this election, and trade union bosses, workers, and voters should show up for him on election day to secure the safety and prosperity of our nation and people.

S. Karol Paul has a background in trade and manufacturing policy and is a contributor to Peter Navarro’s Taking Back Trump’s America

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