China sanctioned American compliance risk advisory firm Kharon, a Kharon researcher and a researcher at the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in reaction to recent U.S. sanctions announced on Human Rights Day earlier this month (see 2312080026).
CBP in November identified 331 shipments valued at more than $125 million for further examination based on the suspected use of forced labor, including goods subject to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and withhold release orders, the agency said in its most recent operational statistics update. The value of those shipments is down from October, when CBP identified 504 shipments worth more than $199 million (see 2311140053). Also in November, CBP seized 1,607 shipments that contained counterfeit goods valued at more than $118 million if the items had been genuine, the agency said.
A former State Department official who advised on sanctions and money laundering, who also is a co-founder of Sayari Labs, a financial intelligence and commercial data provider, said that Hudson Institute will produce a paper on creating a broad sanctions program for China, complete with the kind of language that would allow it to be executive-order ready.
The Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE) recently opened an investigation on whether Guess? jeans or other products of Guess? Canada contain yarn, fabric or cotton made or grown with Uyghur forced labor.
The Southern Shrimp Alliance cheered the House Select Committee on China's recommendation that seafood from China should be subject to a presumption that it was caught or processed with forced labor.
The proposed European Union forced labor trade ban waits to stop goods until after a government investigation finds the goods contain forced labor, in contrast to the U.S. approach, which automatically bans all imports that are suspected to be made with forced labor, without a separate investigation, trade lawyer John Foote said.
CBP issued the following releases on commercial trade and related matters:
Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., the most prominent advocate for restricting de minimis in Congress, said he held an informal hearing in the hopes of building consensus with Republicans. No Republicans attended, but Rep. Don Beyer, a pro-trade Democrat who serves with Blumenauer on the House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee, said in an interview after the hearing that he was swayed.
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Congress should remove permanent normal trade relations status for China, but rather than move Chinese imports into Column 2, it should create a China-specific tariff schedule "that restores U.S. economic leverage to ensure that the [Chinese government] abides by its trade commitments and does not engage in coercive or other unfair trade practices and decreases U.S. reliance on [Chinese] imports in sectors important for national and economic security," the House Select Committee on China wrote as one of its dozens of legislative recommendations in its "Strategy to Win America's Economic Competition with the Chinese Communist Party." The report, released Dec. 12, also recommended: