Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
Codify it or lose it: plan for volatility in US China policy, not direction
A Foreign Affairs essay argues only Congress can make China trade policy durable. The admission underneath it is more useful to operators than the prescription.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
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What happened
- Beijing has used trade not only to generate economic growth but as a geopolitical tool to attract investment, strengthen its industrial base, expand its economy and support its military, integrating national security, economic security, energy policy and environmental policy.
- In sectors including automobiles, chemicals and solar panels, Chinese government policies have led to overproduction at home, pushing companies to export at low prices and flooding international markets, undermining the manufacturing bases of rival economies.
- Policymakers of both parties in Washington recognise the China challenge, but the US approach to addressing it has shifted with each presidential administration and, at times, even within a single presidency.
- The essay argues Congress is the branch best suited to crafting long-term solutions and must establish a durable framework that can outlast political cycles, rather than leaving China strategy to the executive branch alone.
- The essay recommends Congress pass legislation to permanently strengthen enforcement of existing trade laws, modernize customs authorities to better track goods coming from China, deepen partnerships in the Western Hemisphere, and address the advantage China derives from weak enforcement of environmental standards.
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Why it matters
A Foreign Affairs essay makes the case that Washington's approach to China has shifted with each presidential administration and, at times, within a single presidency, and that Congress rather than the executive branch must build a framework that outlasts political cycles [3][4]. The prescription is aimed at legislators. The diagnosis is aimed, whether the authors intended it or not, at anyone with a bill of materials.
The essay's clearest example of durability is the de minimis threshold. Until Congress closed it in July 2025, goods valued at $800 or less entered the United States without a tariff [7]. In 2024, roughly four million packages a day, mostly from China, came in duty free and largely unscreened [8], which works out to something on the order of 1.46 billion packages a year [2]. Counterfeits, goods containing hazardous chemicals including fentanyl, and cheap consumer products moved through that channel [9]. Meanwhile American exporters to China faced tariffs on individual-use products above $6.90 and commercial products above $690.00 [10] - meaning the US threshold sat at roughly 116 times China's individual-use figure [1]. The point the essay presses is procedural rather than moral: repeal by statute produces a rule that a future executive order cannot undo [11].
Set that against what the essay says current enforcement strategy actually rests on. According to the essay, US trade strategy relies on a June 2026 executive order that raises the bond required on high-risk goods, restricts repeat violators of customs rules, sets minimum penalty floors, and expands reporting so Customs and Border Protection can obtain ownership and supply chain information [12]. The authors ask Congress to codify it [13]. Read that as an operator: the bonding, penalties, and disclosure obligations you are budgeting compliance spend against exist at the discretion of whoever signs the next order. Related executive actions, including that June 2026 order, also authorise destruction of counterfeit goods and expand electronic filing [14], on top of customs systems the essay describes as built for an earlier era of global commerce [15].
The underlying pressure is not in dispute across administrations. The essay describes Beijing integrating national security, economic security, energy, and environmental policy, and using trade as a geopolitical instrument [1]; and it attributes overproduction in sectors from automobiles to chemicals to solar panels to Chinese policy, with the surplus exported at low prices into international markets [2]. Nothing in that is a four-year story. So the planning assumption is not that friction goes away, nor that it rises on a schedule. It is that the instrument, the threshold, and the paperwork change hands and change form while the direction holds.
What to watch is narrow and checkable. The essay says many of the relevant bills have already been introduced and simply need to become law [6], across four buckets: permanent enforcement of existing trade laws, modernised customs authorities, deeper Western Hemisphere partnerships, and the advantage China derives from weak environmental enforcement [5]. Track which of those four gets a floor vote rather than a press release. Anything that stays an executive action should be treated in your models as reversible within one election cycle; anything Congress passes is a fixed cost you can finally amortise.