US steel-tariff plan gets pushback

US President Donald Trump's bid to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum from China and other countries has drawn backlash from the Chinese government as well as US lawmakers.

In a meeting on trade with lawmakers at the White House on Tuesday, Trump said the US has been taken advantage of by other countries in aluminum and steel industries and many other industries.

He cited the result of a Section 232 investigation under US Trade Expansion Act of 1962 into whether steel and aluminum imports are threatening to impair US national security. US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross submitted the result to Trump last month.

"They're dumping and destroying our industry and destroying the families of workers. And we can't let that happen," said Trump, pointing fingers at China, South Korea, Canada and several other countries.

He said part of the options would be to impose tariffs. "As they dump steel, they pay tariffs –   substantial tariffs – which means the United States would actually make a lot of money, and probably our steel industry and our aluminum industry would come back into our country. Right now, it's decimated," Trump said.

Geng Shuang, China's Foreign Ministry spokesman, responded on Wednesday that any unilateral or protectionist action would harm the relevant countries and enterprises at the upstream and downstream of the value chain, exacerbate the global trade environment and exert a negative impact on the momentum of world economic recovery.

"All parties should make all-out efforts to avoid that," he told a press briefing in Beijing.

Geng emphasized that both sides should view their differences and frictions from a rational and objective perspective and follow the spirit of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit to address and manage them through dialogue and consultation.

"We are willing to properly handle the issues arising from the bilateral trade through opening domestic markets to each other and making the pie of cooperation bigger so as to deliver more benefits to the two peoples," he said.

Several US lawmakers attending the Tuesday talk also expressed concerns that Section 232 tariffs on imports would trigger retaliations from other countries and hurt many US manufacturers by raising raw material prices.

Pat Toomey, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania, urged Trump to "go very, very cautiously" with Section 232.

He said only 16 percent of US domestic consumption of steel was imported in 2016. "China was down to 2 percent of the 16 percent, so a very, very small portion," he said.

Toomey told Trump that it' hard to make the case of national security, and it "invites retaliation that will be problematic for us".

Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, said the proposed tariffs would hurt the manufacturing jobs that use steel and aluminum as raw materials. He expressed that while there may be some job winners from such actions, it is likely to end up with net job losses in the US.

"And that's what worries me here, particularly in light of the absence of what I can see as a real national security threat," he said.

Only 3 percent of what the US produces domestically is needed for national security reasons, according to Lee.

Senator Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, echoed the view, citing the case in 2002 that a 30 percent hike in US steel tariffs resulted in price increase for almost all steel in the US.

He said that under the tariffs auto parts makers that use the steel cut their jobs and moved outside the US.

"We found there were 10 times as many people in steel-using industries as there were in steel-producing industries," he said.

"I'm just saying it's worth looking at what happened because it backfired, raised prices, and lost jobs," he told Trump.

chenweihua@chinadailyusa.com