Tariff Times Daily: All Eyes on Trump in China
Free trade left us exposed. Thursday's meeting will measure how much room the administration has to reverse it.
THE BOTTOM LINE
President Trump's meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing on Thursday is set to be perhaps the most important event of the administration thus far. The stupidity of free trade led us to this disastrous situation where the Chinese have significant leverage on critical minerals, challenging efforts to decouple. Rumors are circulating about what the meeting will entail, and what options the President is considering. A U.S.-China Board of Trade might work as a management tool as the United States works to build its own capacities independent of China, although this is not without its own risks. There have been talks about a potential $1 trillion investment from China into the United States, such as China potentially building BYD factories within the United States. There are ways to minimize damage from this kind of agreement, but there is a substantial risk with such an agreement both to domestic companies that would thus be competing with these new investments, as well as national security threats related to exposure to Chinese internal dependence and industrial espionage. While many are rushing to make predictions about what will be agreed on and what the results of these agreements will be, in reality, it is far too early to predict. The Tariff Times will be monitoring this situation very closely as it develops.
While the President is abroad, the Justice Department is asking both the Court of International Trade and the Federal Circuit to stay last week's CIT ruling against Section 122, defending the legal architecture that gives the executive branch ready leverage to apply pressure during precisely these kinds of talks. A bipartisan group of senators is also asking the President to hold the line on shipbuilding remedies in Beijing, a useful reminder that the protectionist coalition in Congress now stretches across both parties when American industrial capacity is in view. An extraordinary piece of good news: Auto parts maker Valeo broke ground on a major new manufacturing facility in McAllen, Texas, investing $225 million with production set to begin in late 2027.
TODAY’S STORIES
Trump Arrives in Beijing for Xi Talks With Board of Trade and Critical Minerals on the Agenda
President Trump will arrive in China this week for a state visit that the White House says will advance work on the U.S.-China Board of Trade, a parallel Board of Investment, and additional sectoral agreements spanning aerospace, agriculture, and energy. The October 2025 Busan truce that committed China to license critical minerals exports expires later this year, and senior U.S. officials told reporters Sunday that both governments want it extended, though no announcement has been timed to the trip. The American negotiating posture is built on the tariff architecture the administration has assembled over the last year, and Beijing’s interest in stable relations is a function of that architecture working as designed.
Justice Department Asks Courts to Stay CIT Ruling Against Section 122 Tariffs
The administration filed motions Monday at both the Court of International Trade and the Federal Circuit asking for stays of the CIT decision that ruled the President’s Section 122 tariffs unlawful, arguing that allowing the ruling to take effect would cause irreparable harm to ongoing trade negotiations and reopen the question of refunds on earlier emergency duties. The legal stakes extend well beyond Section 122 itself, since the doctrine the trial court applied would constrain a range of statutory tariff authorities the administration relies on. A successful stay would preserve the President’s full leverage during the Beijing trip and the EU implementation work continuing into July.
Bipartisan Senate Letter Urges Trump to Hold the Line on Shipbuilding in Xi Talks
Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Todd Young (R-IN), and Tim Scott (R-SC) sent the President a joint letter Monday urging him to move forward with trade remedies targeting Chinese shipbuilding practices and to avoid concessions on that front during this week’s meetings with President Xi. The letter reflects how broad the protectionist consensus on Chinese industrial policy has become, with two Democrats and two Republicans aligning on the same recommendation in the same document. Shipbuilding sits at the intersection of industrial base, national security, and merchant marine readiness, and Congressional support for remedy action gives the administration room to take it.
May 11 Senate letter to the President
Valeo to Build $225 Million U.S. Plant, Adding 500 Jobs
French auto-parts supplier Valeo announced a new $225 million U.S. manufacturing facility expected to create 500 American jobs, a reshoring move that follows the auto-sector tariff schedule the administration finalized earlier this year. The facility adds to a growing list of foreign producers concluding that serving the U.S. market from inside the U.S. tariff wall is the most economical option available to them. This is the mechanism Henry Clay described two centuries ago at work in real time: a protected home market drawing capital and production into the country.
Mining and Industry Coalition Pushes to Curb EPA’s Clean Water Act Veto Power
A new “Fix the EPA Veto Coalition” launched May 7 is urging President Trump to direct EPA to open a rulemaking that would limit the agency’s use of Clean Water Act section 404(c) authority to retroactively veto dredge-and-fill permits for mining, energy, and infrastructure projects. The coalition’s concern is that a future administration could weaponize the 404(c) tool to unwind projects approved by this one, an institutional vulnerability that affects the durability of the domestic critical-minerals build-out the administration is otherwise advancing. Permitting reform of this kind is foundational to converting tariff-driven demand signals into domestic capacity that breaks ground and stays built.
FEDERAL REGISTER WATCH
Notice — AD preliminary results: Commerce — Steel concrete reinforcing bar from Mexico sold at less than normal value during the November 2023 to October 2024 period of review, with Deacero Group identified as the principal respondent. Mexico’s rebar exports are a recurring sore point in the North American steel market, and a preliminary affirmative finding on the largest producer maintains the discipline the order was designed to provide. Read notice
Notice — AD/CVD institution: ITC — Preliminary phase antidumping and countervailing duty investigations opened on N-cyclohexylbenzothiazole-2-sulfenamide (a rubber-vulcanization accelerator) from China. Another specialty chemicals case against Chinese state-subsidized capacity, in a segment where the domestic producer base is thin and worth defending. Read notice
Notice — AD preliminary results: Commerce — Certain aluminum foil from Türkiye sold at less than normal value during the 2023-2024 period of review. The aluminum foil order is part of the broader downstream-aluminum tariff complex protecting U.S. converters and rolling mills. Read notice
Notice — Section 337 final determination: ITC — Limited exclusion order and cease-and-desist orders issued against imported semiconductor devices found to violate Section 337. Section 337 remains the workhorse statute for keeping IP-infringing imports out of the U.S. market, and chip-sector findings sharpen the broader semiconductor enforcement regime. Read notice
Notice — Information collection: Commerce — Parts Tariff Offset Program for Motor Vehicles and Motor Vehicle Parts submitted to OMB for review, the administrative plumbing for the auto-sector offset mechanism. Worth watching for any change to how the offset is calculated or claimed. Read notice
ON THE DOCKET
AGOA modernization is the only deadline this week; softwood lumber and the steel-nails sunset reviews trail two and three weeks behind.
May 15 (closes in 3 days) — USTR: Comments on the modernization of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, authorized through year-end 2026 and now up for reauthorization debate. Trade associations with views on duty-free preference design, sourcing rules, or eligibility criteria should file before AGOA’s reauthorization window opens on the Hill. Read notice
May 26 (closes in 14 days) — Commerce: Comments on subsidies, including stumpage subsidies, provided by foreign exporters of softwood lumber during the second half of 2025, under the Softwood Lumber Act. U.S. lumber producers and forest-products associations use this annual filing to document the subsidy patterns that anchor the existing trade remedy regime. Read notice
Jun 01 (closes in 20 days) — ITC: Five-year sunset reviews on steel nails from Malaysia, Oman, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Domestic steel-nail producers should file to maintain the antidumping orders that have kept the industry viable; the order lapses if no party defends it. Read notice
ON THE HILL
HEARINGS & MARKUPS
May 13 — House Foreign Affairs Committee: Markup of the DOMINANCE Act (Developing Overseas Mineral Investments and New Allied Networks for Critical Energies). The bill would direct the State Department to formulate a full critical-minerals strategy including deals with developing producers, providing diplomatic muscle to back up the administration’s domestic build-out. Committee schedule
May 19 — House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Tax: Hearing on the working-families tax provisions, which sits adjacent to the broader manufacturing-incentive tax architecture the committee will need to revisit alongside any tariff-revenue deployment plan. Committee page
BILLS TO WATCH
HR 8730: Bill to prohibit the importation, manufacture, sale, or interstate commerce in connected vehicles and related software and hardware associated with foreign adversaries. Directly advances the connected-vehicle restrictions Commerce has been building out by rulemaking, and creates a statutory floor under that policy regardless of which party controls the executive branch. Referred to House Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, and Foreign Affairs on May 11. View bill
S 4327: Securing America’s Drug Supply from Communist China Act. Targets the pharmaceutical supply-chain dependence that CPA flagged on antibiotics earlier this month; a sector where Chinese concentration is among the most acute in the U.S. industrial base. Referred to Senate HELP April 16. View bill
COMMITTEE STATEMENTS
W&M Republicans: Five Key Moments from last week’s Greer hearing recap, emphasizing tariff-leveraged market access gains for American producers and farmers under the President’s trade agenda. The committee is signaling sustained majority support for the administration’s tariff posture as the Beijing talks open. Read statement
TODAY IN AMERICAN HISTORY
On May 12, 1949, the Soviet Union lifted the Berlin Blockade after eleven months of the Berlin Airlift, an industrial logistics feat in which American factories, aircraft, and aircrews flew 2.3 million tons of cargo into a city Stalin had tried to starve, demonstrating that an industrial democracy can outproduce an authoritarian rival when it chooses to do so.
Tariff Times Daily is published by the American Protective Tariff League.
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