President Donald Trump is likely to unveil sanctions against China on Friday, the White House indicated today, as the officials from the US Trade Representative (USTR) said America has strong evidence of Beijing violating its commitments on intellectual property and technology transfers. “Tomorrow the president will announce the actions he has decided to take based on USTR’s 301 investigations into China’s state-led, market-distorting efforts to force, pressure and steal US technologies and intellectual property,” White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said today.
Officials, however, refrained from giving any further details even as USTR submitted its Section 301 report on its investigation into “unfair” Chinese trade practices to the president.
Tariffs and a potential WTO case are certainly on the table, a USTR official told reporters during a briefing on Section 301 investigation report.
The administration, according to the official, is not satisfied with the type of responses the United States has been getting from China.
“We have strong evidence against China. These are deeply concerning to the administration and raise severe questions about China and its commitment to market-oriented practices that they promised to engage in,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The USTR looked into four types of allegations: charges that China is putting pressure on companies to enter into joint ventures where they would transfer their technology to a Chinese company; US companies do not have the same ability to license their IP as a Chinese company; whether or not china is using state funds to purchase IP in the US; concerns that China was involved in intruding into US commercial networks for commercial gains.
Responding to a question, the official said not every bad trade action violates the WTO.
“It’s difficult to use the WTO that involves the informal pressure stakeholders have complained about. The idea that you can take this to the WTO isn’t practical. To the extent we can get at these things at the WTO, we will do so. We’re pursuing a number of cases against them right now. We’ll use it where we can but we can’t use it to address everything,” the official said.