One of the highest priorities of the Biden administration’s trade agenda is resetting the U.S.-China trade relationship with a view to putting American farmers and exporters on a level playing field with their Chinese counterparts, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said on March 30. In a prepared statement before a House Ways & Means Committee hearing, Tai criticized the prominent role of state-owned enterprises in China’s imports and exports as well as “labor rights suppression, a weak environmental regime, [and] other distortions that put market-oriented participants out of business.” She also noted Beijing’s failure to meet purchase commitments under the “phase one” trade agreement signed in January 2020. Those purchase agreements stipulated that China would import at least $200 million more of U.S. goods and products in 2020-2021 than the country bought in 2017. “We absolutely need to enforce all our agreements, phase one included, and that’s why we’ve spent the last several …
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