The Commerce Department has again found that Chinese solar manufacturers are evading United States tariffs by rerouting their supply chains through four Asian countries. The findings come after President Joe Biden shielded the Chinese companies with a 24-month tariff moratorium.
On Friday, the Commerce Department issued its final ruling that Chinese solar manufacturers are evading United States tariffs by sending their products through Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam for minor adjustments.
“Specifically, Commerce found that five companies were attempting to avoid the payment of U.S. duties by completing minor processing in third countries and that three companies were not circumventing,” agency officials wrote in their ruling. “Commerce also found that certain unexamined companies were circumventing.”
In 2022, the Commerce Department initially found the same violations.
Still, Biden has kept in place a 24-month tariff moratorium on solar panel imports from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, ensuring that such Chinese solar manufacturers are paying nothing to bring their highly-subsidized products into the United States market.
“The White House should be absolutely ashamed that, despite its own Commerce Department determining that the Chinese are illegally violating U.S. trade law, it remains intent on protecting China’s predatory activity and rewarding their cheating,” Coalition for a Prosperous America Chairman Zach Mottl said in a statement.
Mottl explained:
… instead of facing accountability for their actions, Chinese companies will face zero repercussions for their illegal trade activity thanks to President Biden’s Solar Emergency Declaration. [Emphasis added]
Because of that harmful rule, Chinese companies are free to continue to flood the U.S. market with no repercussions indefinitely. Not only does this make a mockery of our trade laws, but it undercuts the [Inflation Reduction Act’s] policies to boost domestic solar manufacturing. If the White House continues to do the bidding of Beijing and openly work against U.S. trade laws, the tens of billions of dollars in investment as a result of the IRA could disappear just as quickly as they were announced. [Emphasis added]
Even when the House and Senate sought to restore tariffs on Chinese solar manufacturers, Biden vetoed the measure. Later, nearly all House Democrats and eight House Republicans voted against overriding the veto.
From 2001 to 2018, United States free trade with China eliminated 3.7 million American jobs from the economy — 2.8 million of which were lost in American manufacturing. During that same period, at least 50,000 American manufacturing plants closed down.
A closed factory is shown in downtown East Liverpool, Ohio, on October 24, 2016. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Those massive job losses have coincided with a booming U.S.-China trade deficit. In 1985, before China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO), the U.S. trade deficit with China totaled $6 billion. In 2019, the U.S. trade deficit with China totaled more than $345 billion.
Weeds grow in the parking lot of the closed Culp Weaving plant in Burlington, North Carolina, on June 8, 2009. The upholstery giant moved to China to take advantage of cheaper labor. (Jim R. Bounds/AP)
While skyrocketing U.S. trade deficits have led to devastation across America’s working- and middle-class communities over the last two decades, tariffs would be a boon for reshoring jobs and boosting wages, studies show. One such study finds that tariffs on nearly all foreign imports would create about ten million American jobs while boosting domestic output.
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Jack Knudsen / Breitbart NewsJohn Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
