News & Press

USTR Modifies Section 301 Tariffs; Imposing An Increased Duty on $200 Billion Worth of Chinese Goods

On July 10, 2018, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer released a notice of tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports. The list consists of a 10 percent tariff on all 6,031 8-digit tariff subheadings, in addition to maintaining the original lists of 818 and 284 articles.

Please click here for a complete list of the subjected tariffs on the USTR website.

The USTR will provide a comprehensive public notice and key dates for a comment period and hearing process, prior to implementation.

• July 27, 2018 – Due date for filing requests to appear at the public hearing
• August 17, 2018 – Due date for submission of written comments
• August 20-23, 2018 – The Section 301 Committee will convene a public hearing
• August 30, 2018 – Due date for the submission of post-hearing rebuttal comments

Per the Office of the United States Trade Representative, “The Section 301 Committee will convene a public hearing in the main hearing room of the U.S. International Trade Commission, 500 E Street SW, Washington DC, 20436, commencing at 9:30 am on August 20, 2018. You must have all requests to appear at the hearing submitted by July 27, 2018.”

USTR announced there will be an opportunity for the public to request an exclusion of a particular product from the additional tariffs. However, this will only be on specific items within a subheading but not the tariff subheading as a whole.

The exclusion process has the following important dates and notices:

• The public will have 90 days to file a request for a product exclusion; this period will end on October 9, 2018.
• Following public posting of the filed request on Regulations.gov, the public will have 14 days to file responses for the request of product exclusion. After the 14 day response period, the public will have an additional 7 days to respond to any responses received in support of or opposition to the request.
• Exclusions will be effective for one year upon the publication of the exclusion determination in the Federal Register, and will apply retroactively to July 6, 2018.

USTR prefers all electronic submissions be made through the Federal eRulemaking Portal. The docket number is USTR-2018-0025.

Rogers & Brown will continue to monitor the situation and provide updates as they become available. If you have any questions regarding this please contact our sales team at sales@rogers-brown.com.