Exports to China

The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security added 28 entities to its Entity List for their involvement in human rights violations of China’s Uighur population, BIS said Oct. 7. The entities include Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region People’s Government Public Security Bureau, 18 of its subsidiaries and eight China-based technology and science companies, including Hikvision, a major supplier of video surveillance products. The announcement takes effect Oct. 9.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Information Technology Industry Council and 25 other trade groups, including groups from Africa, Asia, South America and Europe, have issued a position paper on what they'd like to see in the plurilateral E-Commerce Agreement at the World Trade Organization. The U.S. and China are both in these talks, and some are concerned that China will oppose what business groups describe as high-standard planks, such as prohibiting data localization and no restrictions on cross-border data flows.

The government of Canada issued the following trade-related notices as of Oct. 4 (note that some may also be given separate headlines):

The U.S. government lacks technical knowledge and a single, leading voice in its approach to technology competition with China, said Adam Segal, the emerging technologies chair at the Council on Foreign Relations. Segal, speaking during an Oct. 4 Brookings Institution panel about the U.S.-China technology relationship, said U.S. industries are concerned that technology policies, such as certain export controls, are being made without a full understanding of their impacts.

U.S. sanctions on two large shipping companies last month disrupted the tanker market, forcing oil traders to cancel bookings and causing rates to spike as they searched for other ships, according to a September post from Clyde & Co.

Brazil added another 147 items to its list of foreign capital, information technology and telecommunications goods exempt from import tariffs under its Ex-Tarifario regime, according to an Oct. 3 report from the Hong Kong Trade Development Council. Tariffs will be reduced to zero, from 16 percent or 14 percent, the report said, and many of the additional goods “could potentially be imported” from China and Hong Kong. The additions include 136 capital goods and 11 IT and telecom goods and will be exempt from tariffs through Dec. 31, 2021, the HKTDC said. Brazil added 281 products to its Ex-Tarifario regime in August (see 1908120042).

Uncertainty over trade policy and African swine fever continue to overtake agricultural markets, causing “volatility across the industry,” CoBank said in its quarterly U.S. rural economic review, released this month. But there were two bright spots for U.S. exporters, CoBank said: the renewed Chinese purchases of U.S. agricultural products and the initial trade agreement between the U.S. and Japan, which will allow the U.S. ag industry to regain competitiveness in a “key export destination.”

Recent editions of Mexico's Diario Oficial list trade-related notices as follows:

The government of Canada issued the following trade-related notices as of Oct. 2 (note that some may also be given separate headlines):

Many things about the U.S.-China trade war have not turned out as experts expected, panelists said at the Washington International Trade Association Oct. 2. Chad Bown, a trade economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former White House economist, said that 18 months ago, people would have not expected there to be 15 percent to 30 percent tariffs on more than half of Chinese imports, with nearly all the rest slated for tariffs by December, and yet, the economy is doing OK. "Markets haven't panicked," he said. But Bown said he's not that surprised that the country hasn't seen a massive effect from the trade war, since the tariffs in place the longest were on inputs, and because, compared to the size of the entire economy, "we don't actually trade all that much."