Corporate America fights uphill battle against anti-China push
Trade
Companies are teaming up with untraditional allies out of fear that the fall legislative session will lead to restrictive laws.
Chinese Vice Premier Liu He shake hands with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
“There's a huge consumer market in China. Most of the big U.S. companies are selling there. They're not just using it as an export platform. They're integrated into the economy in other ways,” said Rufus Yerxa, a former senior U.S. trade representative and WTO official who is now president of the National Foreign Trade Council.
The lobbying is aimed at derailing some of the most aggressive trade restrictions advocated by the Biden administration and congressional leaders just as the White House tries to pivot its security focus to Beijing after the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.
Groups representing hundreds of the biggest U.S. companies, from Amazon to JPMorgan Chase and Nike, have so far gotten lawmakers to kill legislation that would mandate government reviews for American investments in China, weaken anti-Beijing rhetoric in an evolving House legislative package, and insert corporate-friendly provisions to an anti-forced labor bill that would reshape how the federal government implements trade restrictions.
U.S. President Donald Trump, left, and Chinese President Xi Jinping arrive for a meeting.
FILE - In this Saturday, July 8, 2017, file photo, U.S. President Donald Trump, left, and Chinese President Xi Jinping arrive for a meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany. After a cordial meeting between Trump and Xi in April 2017, tensions are simmering again between the world’s two biggest economies. As U.S. and Chinese economic officials prepare to meet Wednesday, July 19, in Washington, the U.S. is weighing whether to slap tariffs on steel imports and risk setting off a trade war, a dicey option to deal with a problem caused largely by China’s massive overproduction of steel. | (Saul Loeb/Pool Photo via AP, File)
But none of those bills have been finalized, and big business groups are worried that they won’t be able to rely on their traditional allies once the fall legislative session begins.
“It feels like the business community doesn’t have any true blue friends on the Hill at this point when it comes to China,” said one industry lobbyist who asked not to be named due to ongoing work with Congress. “Everything is a matter of degree.”
Republicans have either cheered Biden’s tough line on China or pushed him to go further. That’s got some lobbyists turning to the only folks left in the room: progressives.
In recent months, the U.S.-China Business Council, which represents more than 250 American firms that do business in China, has reached out to aides for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and anti-war groups like Justice is Global, one of scores of groups that endorsed letters urging Congress to pump the brakes on anti-China provisions and prioritize climate change cooperation with Beijing.
The U.S. can hold Beijing accountable for human rights and trade abuses, the groups and progressives argue, without closing down commerce or cooperation.
“We’ve tried to message that national security obviously has to be tended to and prioritized,” said Anna Ashton, the council’s vice president for advisory services and government affairs. “That may change some of the parameters of commercial engagement with China, but at the end of the day our economy has benefited enormously by being able to [trade] with China.”
Efforts from the corporate lobbyists seek to blunt the rising economic aggression toward Beijing emanating from Congress and the Biden administration that’s seen the president retain most of his predecessor’s aggressive trade policies, much to industry’s chagrin.
The White House in recent months has issued new trade restrictions and sanctions on Chinese firms while refusing to lift tariffs imposed by former President Donald Trump, insisting they are still under review.
Meanwhile, the House and Senate have advanced separate measures that would spend hundreds of billions of dollars to confront China economically and, in the Senate’s case, increase military surveillance and assistance to regional allies.
Corporate lobby groups are expressing concern that the government’s actions will cause members to draw down their business interests in China. That would not only harm their bottom lines, they argue, but diminish what little leverage the U.S. has to get China to change course from its human rights abuses.
“I would argue that a lot of [U.S. firms] are probably better forces for good business practices and good governance than maybe the state-owned Chinese companies are,” Yerxa said. “If we do some specific kind of targeted thing that makes it impossible for [U.S. corporations] to maintain their businesses, their foreign and Chinese competitors can continue doing it. How effective has it been in changing China's policies?”
The corporations have tried to align their lobbying efforts with the way progressive advocacy groups have pushed back against the emerging China doctrine. They express fear that the tougher U.S. line will commit America to decades of increased military spending and heightened tensions, potentially escalating to a regional war or worse.
