Joseph R. Biden Jr. ran for the White House as a harsh critic of President Donald J. Trump’s crackdown on trade with China. In office, however, he took Trump’s trade war with Beijing and escalated it, albeit with a very different goal.
The two men, locked in a revenge election this fall, share a rhetorical penchant for criticizing China’s economic practices, including accusing the Chinese of cheating in global trade. They also share a key policy to counter Beijing: hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs or taxes on Chinese imports. Those tariffs were first imposed by Trump and have been maintained by President Biden.
On Tuesday, Biden announced that he will increase some of those tariffs. That includes quadrupling tariffs on electric vehicles to 100 percent, tripling certain taxes on steel and aluminum products to 25 percent and doubling the rate on semiconductors to 50 percent.
But Biden’s trade war differs from Trump’s in important ways. Trump was trying to bring back a wide range of factory jobs outsourced to China. Biden is seeking to increase production and jobs in a select group of emerging high-tech industries, including clean energy sectors such as electric vehicles, which Trump shows little interest in cultivating.
Biden has pulled more political levers, some of them created by Trump. He has imposed more restrictions on trade with China, including limiting sales of American technology to Beijing, while funneling federal subsidies to American manufacturers trying to compete with Chinese production.
And in a sharp break from Trump’s go-it-alone stance, Biden’s strategy relies on rallying international allies to counter China through a combination of domestic incentives and, potentially, coordinated tariffs on Chinese goods.
As they compete again for the White House, Biden and Trump promise to further increase trade pressure on China, which they both accuse of unfair trade practices that harm American workers. Here’s how their plans overlap and where they diverge sharply.
Trump’s plan includes more tariffs and less trade.
Trump broke decades of political consensus by imposing aggressive restrictions on trade with China as president. He imposed tariffs on more than $360 billion worth of Chinese goods, including toys, electronics and home furnishings, prompting retaliatory tariffs from Beijing.
In 2020, he reached an agreement with Chinese officials that required China to increase its purchases of goods exported from the United States, including agricultural products, and carry out a series of economic reforms. China did not come close to meeting those terms. Lael Brainard, director of Biden’s National Economic Council, told reporters this week that the deal “did not live up to its promises.”
Trump has promised new efforts to sever the trade relationship between the nations if he is elected to a second term. These include barriers to investment between the two countries, along with bans on imports of Chinese steel, electronics and pharmaceuticals. He has also proposed an additional 10 percent tariff on all imports to the United States, not just those from China. And he has criticized Mr. Biden.
Chinese officials were “petrified that I would impose additional tariffs,” Trump told CNBC in March. “And we don’t use that, China is now our boss. “They are the bosses of the United States, almost as if we were a subsidiary of China, and that is because the Biden administration has been very weak.”
Biden is building on his predecessor’s efforts.
Biden was once a critic of Trump’s tariffs. “President Trump may think he’s being tough on China,” Biden said in a 2019 speech as a presidential candidate, “but all he’s done is more pain for American farmers, manufacturers and consumers.”
Early in the Biden administration, his aides discussed reducing many of Trump’s taxes on Chinese imports to ease the pain of rapid price increases. In the end they decided not to do it. Instead, Biden will announce Tuesday that he will raise tariffs on about $18 billion worth of Chinese imports, including solar cells, ship-to-shore cranes and certain medical technologies.
His administration has also imposed new restrictions on exports of American semiconductors and chipmaking materials to China, and has taken the first step to crack down on imported Chinese smart car technologies.
Administration officials offer economic rationales for all of those measures. But Biden is also responding to political pressure from swing states and trying to outflank Trump on the China issue. Last month, he called for higher taxes on Chinese imports of heavy metals in a speech to steelworkers in Pennsylvania, a crucial state where polls show he is struggling to overcome voter anxiety about the economy.
And while Biden’s advisers say his tariff approach is more targeted (and, by extension, more effective) than Trump’s, the president has notably decided not to reverse any of the original tariffs Trump imposed on Chinese goods.
A greener war, this time with allies.
However, Biden has adapted his policy. He has consciously combined new restrictions on trade with China with strategic investments, in the form of government spending and tax credits, which he has used to attract new factory production in a handful of specific sectors.
Perhaps no product better exemplifies the divergence between Biden and Trump on trade policy than electric vehicles. Trump sees them as a scourge and has said efforts to accelerate their adoption will result in a “murder” of American jobs.
Biden has signed multiple laws aimed at boosting production and consumption of electric vehicles in the United States, including an infrastructure bill with funding for 500,000 charging stations and a climate law with lucrative incentives to manufacture and sell vehicles in the United States. They are part of an ambitious industrial strategy to build American factory capacity for a range of clean energy technologies aimed at fighting climate change and dominating advanced manufacturing industries globally for decades to come.
Biden is increasingly concerned that a flood of low-cost electric cars and other goods from China could undermine those efforts, and he is using trade policy to protect his industrial investments. Its tariff increases planned for Tuesday include quadrupling the tariff on imported electric vehicles, up to 100 percent.
And while Trump antagonized his allies by imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum from Japan, the European Union and elsewhere, the president has sought to assemble a coalition of wealthy democracies to fight China on clean energy. His administration led an effort at the Group of 7 summit last year to outline a harmonized subsidy strategy to compete with China’s state funding for new technologies.
Many current and former administration officials hope that cooperation will now extend to tariffs as well, starting with Europe, which is conducting its own investigations into Chinese trade practices and appears willing to increase its current tax rate on electric vehicles. imported Chinese.