China Origin 45 year Old Katherine Tai will be Next USTR in Biden Era

· China Tangle in Trump Times may be Slowly Resolved

President-elect Joe Biden inherits a litany of unresolved trade issues from Donald Trump, posing an early test for his administration even as he focuses on taming Covid-19 and repairing the domestic economy.

As Biden takes office on Wednesday, the U.S. and China have tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of each other’s goods from their trade war. A long-running dispute with the European Union over illegal subsidies to Airbus and Boeing persists, the U.S. and U.K. have yet to reach a free-trade agreement, and the World Trade Organization is blocked from appointing a new leader because Trump objected to the leading choice.

Then there’s the overhauled North American Free Trade Agreement negotiated by outgoing U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer. The deal won Democratic support after changes for Mexico’s labor system demanded by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and engineered by her chief trade lawyer Katherine Tai, now Biden’s nominee for USTR. The AFL-CIO labor union says it plans to bring a complaint under the deal, which could result in factory-specific tariffs or import prohibitions.

With Biden promising to prioritize healing the American economy savaged by lockdowns and job losses, trade might appear to be taking a back seat in the economic agenda. But Trump and Lighthizer gave trade such a central place in public attention that Biden may find the campaign that they started impossible to ignore.

Tougher Enforcement

Tougher enforcement of trade rules “can be a key part of the President-elect’s Build Back Better agenda,” Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and incoming chairman of the Finance Committee responsible for trade, said last week. Wyden said he expects Biden to use trade as one element of a strategy of work with allies to confront China on human rights, labor rights and its treatment of the environment, and to make sure Mexico meets labor obligations.

Biden’s challenge: setting a new direction after Trump tore up the trade playbook of his predecessors, accusing them of weak negotiating skills that led to millions of manufacturing workers losing their jobs. While Biden is unlikely to follow Trump’s example of using obscure parts of trade law to slap tariffs on allies like the EU, he probably won’t go back to the business-friendly stance of past presidents, either.

In a speech last week, Tai pledged to pursue trade policies that benefit American workers, combat the threat of climate change — a non-consideration during the Trump years — and increase U.S. competitiveness.

One of the pressures that she will face will be to balance between the interests of corporations and unions. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants to see the tariff dispute with Beijing resolved. The lobby group calls China the fastest-growing market for U.S. companies, while recognizing that it has some unfair trade and regulatory practices that need changing.

Reciprocal tariffs imposed by China have hammered American agricultural producers and manufacturers. Still, the Biden administration may be wise to use the incentive of removing U.S. duties remaining on about $370 billion of annual Chinese goods imports as a way to exact policy changes that it wants from the world’s second-biggest economy, said Demetrios Marantis, who served as deputy USTR under President Barack Obama and is now a senior vice president at Visa.

Trump “is leaving a lot of things on the table,” said William Reinsch, a trade official in the Clinton administration and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The mantra for the Biden people has been mostly ‘No sudden moves.’ I don’t think they’re going to rush to fix all those things. I think they’re going to take their time to review them.”