Industry To Trump Administration: A U.S./China Board of Trade Will Only Work If It’s Built to Last
In 500 comments to USTR, companies and trade groups say the new mechanism needs standing meetings, clear rules on “nonsensitive” goods and a formal seat at the table for business — while tariff hardliners want the whole idea scrapped
American companies and industry groups have delivered a consistent message to the Trump administration on its proposed U.S./China Board of Trade: good intentions won’t be enough. If the new mechanism is to deliver the trade stability both governments say they want, it must be institutionalized — with regular high-level meetings backed by continuous staff-level work, clear definitions of which goods qualify for tariff relief and formal channels for industry to shape the discussions. Farm and energy/fuel groups, among the most active commenters, pressed a parallel demand: use the board to claw back the Chinese market access they lost to retaliation — rolling Chinese tariffs on U.S. crops, meat and ethanol back to most-favored-nation levels — and to finally enforce the purchase commitments and sanitary and biotech pledges China left unfulfilled under the Phase One agreement. (Details on the agriculture and energy submissions are in the sidebar box below.)
That was the through line in comments submitted to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which solicited public feedback on the scope and design of the board with a July 10 deadline. As of Sunday, USTR had received and uploaded 500 comments on the mechanism, which the United States and China agreed to stand up as one of the outcomes of President Donald Trump’s May visit to Beijing. The “government-to-government” board will host discussions on facilitating trade in “nonsensitive” products, USTR said at the time — talks that are expected to lead to tariff reductions.
Predictably, much of the docket reads like a catalog of commercial wish lists. Individual companies and industries made the case for why their specific products should count as nonsensitive and therefore be eligible for tariff relief, with exercise machinery, silica-based cat litter, Halloween costumes, bicycles, toys, digital camera lenses and sporting apparel among the hundreds of products put forward as examples.
But the more consequential submissions looked past product-by-product pleading to the architecture of the board itself. The United States Council for International Business argued the body “should be institutionalized as a continuous, standing forum rather than an ad hoc dialogue.” The Information Technology Industry Council similarly called for senior officials to meet on a fixed, regular schedule, with working-level officials meeting “continuously” between the high-level sessions.
That emphasis on structure reflects hard-won experience. The U.S./China economic relationship has cycled through a string of dialogue mechanisms over the past two decades — from the Strategic Economic Dialogue to the Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade — that tended to produce deliverables timed to summits and then drift when political attention moved elsewhere. Industry’s message, in effect, is that a board of trade whose activity depends on the state of the leaders’ relationship will amplify volatility rather than dampen it. Regular staff-level work is the ballast: it keeps technical problems moving toward resolution even when the political weather turns.
Several commenters wanted that working-level machinery organized by sector. The U.S./China Business Council (USBC) suggested a working group focused on semiconductor materials and advanced electronics. The American Petroleum Institute called for reviving the U.S./China Oil and Gas Industry Forum under the board’s remit — a body that convened business and government leaders annually from 1998 to 2018 before falling dormant when trade tensions flared during the first Trump administration.
Business groups also pressed for a guaranteed voice in the process, not just proximity to it. “Crucially, business leaders must be consistently involved in these dialogues through a structured, confidential industry-input channel” to ensure “policy decisions reflect commercial realities and supply chain needs,” USCBC said. The confidentiality point is notable: companies with China exposure are often reluctant to comment publicly for fear of retaliation from either government, so a protected channel may be the price of getting candid input at all.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, meanwhile, flagged a more basic problem — industry is being asked to advise on a mechanism whose contours remain undefined. Charles Freeman, the Chamber’s senior vice president for Asia, used his submission to press for clarification on key questions: whether agricultural purchase commitments would fall under the board’s purview, whether restrictions and tariffs on sensitive goods would be buttressed alongside any tariff reductions on nonsensitive ones, and whether industry will also get to weigh in on the proposed “board of investment” announced during the same Beijing visit.
The definitional question may prove the hardest. The Retail Industry Leaders Association asked the administration to provide a clear and practical definition of nonsensitive goods — one that accounts for national security and supply chain risks but also considers whether a product has a U.S. production base and how much it matters to household affordability. That framing is a quiet argument for a broad definition: consumer goods with no domestic manufacturing footprint, retailers contend, should be first in line for relief. Where the administration draws that line will determine whether the board is a meaningful channel for tariff reduction or a narrow one.
Not everyone wants the line drawn at all. The Coalition for a Prosperous America, which represents U.S. producers and workers and has been an ardent backer of tariffs, urged officials to scrap the plan entirely, arguing that no American-made product is truly nonsensitive. “Any product for which China is permitted to capture the U.S. market becomes a strategic dependency,” the group said in its submission.
That objection previews the political fight ahead. Every product deemed nonsensitive is a potential opening for tariff relief — and, in the coalition’s view, a potential strategic vulnerability. The administration will have to reconcile its own tariff-first instincts with a mechanism explicitly designed to lower duties on some subset of Chinese goods, all while an influential part of its political base insists that subset should be empty.
| Farm and fuel groups see the Board of Trade as their road back into China — with conditionsFrom ethanol’s plea for a 55% tariff rollback to a cotton industry that lost nine-tenths of its China business, ag and energy commenters want the new mechanism to reopen markets, enforce Phase One’s unkept promises and keep artificial Christmas trees off the “nonsensitive” list Agriculture and energy interests used the U.S./China board of trade docket to make one overarching argument: no sector fits the administration’s definition of “nonsensitive” trade better than theirs, and no sector has paid a steeper price for retaliation. Across more than a dozen submissions from farm groups, commodity associations and fuel producers, commenters detailed collapsed export lines, unfulfilled Phase One commitments and a wish list for how the new government-to-government mechanism should be built — while one corner of American agriculture argued the opposite side of the ledger, urging USTR to keep a Chinese-made competitor product out of the tariff-relief program entirely. The ethanol industry made the docket’s most detailed energy-sector case. Growth Energy, the largest U.S. ethanol trade association, urged USTR to explicitly include undenatured and denatured ethanol (HS 22071000 and 22072000) on the nonsensitive list, laying out the tariff mathematics: the United States charges a “de minimis” 1.9% to 2.5 % on ethanol imports, while U.S. ethanol entering China faces applied tariffs of 50% (undenatured) and 55% (denatured) once retaliation is stacked on MFN rates of 40% and 30%. “Reciprocity would signal a decrease in the applied tariff on U.S. ethanol to China without a need to decrease U.S. tariffs,” the group wrote. The submission traces a market that has effectively vanished — 198 million gallons worth $313 million in 2016, purchases of $50.9 million in 2020 and $162.4 million in 2021 under Phase One, and “no meaningful volumes” since — even as U.S. ethanol exports overall set a record of 2.2 billion gallons worth $4.8 billion in 2025. Growth Energy argued Chinese purchases would serve Beijing’s own E10 blending targets and decarbonization plans, noted that the Renewable Fuel Standard would act as a guardrail against any reverse flow of Chinese synthetic ethanol, and warned that a U.S./China ethanol channel is needed to match the ethanol cooperation agreement Brazil signed with China in May 2025. It also floated a forward-looking play: pairing U.S. ethanol with Chinese methanol as alcohol-based marine fuels to decarbonize shipping. The American Petroleum Institute filed on deadline day through John Schoenecker, its senior trade counsel, with its substance in an attached submission; as previously noted, the oil and gas industry has pressed for the Board of Trade to house a revived U.S./China Oil and Gas Industry Forum, the business-and-government dialogue that ran from 1998 until trade tensions killed it in 2018. And in the docket’s most unusual energy filing, Energy Access Innovations, a Texas manufacturer of battery storage systems, argued that lithium-ion batteries should be deemed sensitive and excluded from tariff relief — and proposed that the board’s data-sharing mechanism reconcile Chinese customs export declarations against U.S. entry filings shipment-by-shipment to catch the systematic undervaluation it says pervades Chinese battery imports. On the farm side, the American Farm Bureau Federation set the frame. Soybeans accounted for 47% of U.S. agricultural exports to China in 2024, and the submission charts how a market once evenly split has tilted to Brazil, which shipped 73 million metric tons — 70% of Chinese soybean imports — in 2024 against 27 million tons from the United States. AFBF welcomed China’s new commitments of at least 25 million metric tons of soybean purchases annually for three years plus $17 billion in other agricultural products, then asked USTR for three things: strip Chinese tariffs on U.S. farm goods back to MFN levels, including the 10% retaliatory remnant left in place after the Busan agreement; use the board as an accountability mechanism for Phase One’s unkept commitments, singling out China’s “asynchronous” biotech approval process and its refusal to conduct the promised ractopamine risk assessment; and convert China’s purchase pledges into “tangible, enforceable goals” that outlast any one administration. The corn lobby went further on structure. The National Corn Growers Association — whose members watched the Chinese market for corn, ethanol and distillers grains go “effectively zero” in 2025 after China fell $13 billion short of its Phase One purchase targets — asked USTR to create a dedicated Biotechnology and Agricultural Innovation Working Group within the board, “instead of relegating it to a sub-group of an agriculture focused section.” China committed in Phase One to a 24-month average biotech approval timeline; NCGA says the average for U.S. products now exceeds 5.5 years, with two applications pending more than nine. The group wants purchases made contingent on biotech approvals and, notably, told USTR to prioritize durable market access over headline purchase commitments: short-term purchases “do not allow farmers to plan for the future.” Its Indiana affiliate underscored the stakes locally — $1.52 billion in corn, ethanol and co-product export value for Indiana alone. Wheat, rice and cotton groups each brought WTO case law to the table. U.S. Wheat Associates, noting zero U.S. wheat shipments to China in 2025 while Canada and Australia supplied 97% of Chinese imports, argued wheat is the paradigmatic nonsensitive good — a humanitarian staple exempt even from U.S. sanctions regimes — and proposed the board establish a digital “protocol of assurance” for the bilateral grain trade: a single-window documentation system that would differentiate U.S. wheat from competitors, plus Chinese data-sharing on its opaque tariff-rate quota. USA Rice recounted that China imposed a 25% retaliatory duty in 2018 despite never having imported U.S. rice, and — citing China’s losses in the DS517 and DS558 WTO disputes and subsidized old-stock Chinese rice flowing into the U.S. market through Puerto Rico — asked for a 5% carveout of China’s WTO rice quota reserved for U.S. rice, with minimum purchase commitments including for state trader COFCO. The National Cotton Council quantified the sector’s collapse: U.S. cotton exports to China fell 87% in 2025 to 527,000 bales, export value dropped from a $1.9 billion average to $216 million, and U.S. market share sank from 43% to 11% while Brazil’s reached 60%. Both the NCC and the American Cotton Shippers Association (ACSA) want cotton written explicitly into the $17 billion non-soybean purchase commitment, with ACSA adding a pointed reciprocity argument — Chinese textiles enjoy broad U.S. access while U.S. cotton faces a 40% out-of-quota tariff even in calm times. The protein sector’s filings read as a catalog of sanitary and technical grievances the board should be built to resolve. The U.S. Meat Export Federation, which supports quarterly board meetings, said retaliatory tariffs are real but “SPS barriers are the primary trade restricting factors” for beef — citing China’s new beef safeguard imposed Jan. 1, 2026, and 100% testing of U.S. pork offal for pseudorabies that continued even after the disease event was formally closed. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association asked that beef nontariff barriers sit on the board’s quarterly agenda “for the foreseeable future,” given China’s history of delisting U.S. facilities “with little-to-no warning,” and flagged that China has blocked bovine genetics exports since it stopped issuing veterinary certificates, with regulators unresponsive since 2022. The Meat Institute warned that pork industry losses would approach $1.04 to $1.3 billion if China access disappears and noted the Section 301 tariff-exclusion process that has underpinned recent trade could expire later this year. The USA Poultry and Egg Export Council said China still bans raw poultry from 29 states — 73% of registered U.S. facilities — despite Phase One’s regionalization commitments, and asked the board to review avian-influenza delistings twice a year against the World Organisation for Animal Health’s 28-day standard rather than China’s 90. Farmers for Free Trade distilled the sector’s ask into two sentences: eliminate Chinese tariffs on all U.S. food and agricultural exports — its list runs from soybeans and beef through ethanol and distillers grains — and eliminate U.S. tariffs on the imported inputs farmers buy, from fertilizer to machinery parts, noting farm operating loan volume jumped roughly 30% in 2025. And then there is the dissent from within agriculture itself. The National Christmas Tree Association, backed by dozens of individual growers who filed form comments, urged USTR to exclude artificial Christmas trees (HTS 9505.10.40 and 9505.10.50) from any nonsensitive list, arguing that a product 87% to 90% sourced from China — imports have tripled to more than $500 million since 2000 — competes directly against a domestic agricultural crop whose growers have lost nearly 30% of farms and 150,000 acres in two decades. “The producers harmed are precisely the farmers and rural communities this mechanism is meant to support,” the association wrote — a reminder that even in farm country, one industry’s tariff relief is another’s renewed import threat. Notably absent from the docket: the American Soybean Association, pork and dairy producer groups, and the U.S. Grains Council — silences that may reflect soybeans’ separate treatment under the purchase arrangements struck in Busan and Beijing, and that leave room for filings in the rebuttal docket open through July 27. |
The stakes for the administration are clear enough. If the board becomes a durable institution with predictable processes, it could give companies the planning certainty they have lacked through years of tariff whiplash — and give both governments a pressure-release valve short of escalation. If it remains an ad hoc dialogue convened when summit optics demand it, industry’s comments suggest it will join the long list of U.S./China mechanisms that promised stability and delivered communiqués. The 500 submissions now sitting at USTR amount to a request that the administration choose the first path — and a warning that business will judge the board by its plumbing, not its press releases.
