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China Quietly Giving Tariff Exemptions: AmCham China's Michael Hart

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Bloomberg Apr 28 01:48 · 9382 Views

China is giving tariff exemptions to some companies in the IT, healthcare, and aviation sectors, American Chamber of Commerce in China President Michael Hart tells Bloomberg. Chinese officials have also asked companies to identify critical imports that would be difficult to source from other countries. Hart speaks as Chinese policymakers try to reassure the public that they will take measures to aid growth as record US tariffs dent the economy's outlook.

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  • 00:00 Officially, the government hasn't said there are any exemptions, but there are lists circulating and companies have reported that they're getting some exemptions, primarily in IT,
  • 00:09 in healthcare and now in aviation.
  • 00:14 What?
  • 00:14 Which I guess is, is is really a good thing.
  • 00:18 It is a certainly a Michael, a sign of the escalation I think if you
  • 00:21 want to phrase it that way.
  • 00:22 What about the end?
  • 00:22 Just to ask you as well the other side to that, have
  • 00:24 any of your members, and we know about the bowling story of course, have any of your members experienced some of their products then being turned away?
  • 00:33 So more than being turned away, there were a
  • 00:36 lot of shipments stacking up at China Customs where China Customs was trying to figure out
  • 00:40 how to deal with certain products.
  • 00:42 And so
  • 00:43 this exemption list, we believe the first part was to help
  • 00:47 China Customs get unstuck to say we're, we've got things backing up here,
  • 00:51 what do we do?
  • 00:52 And
  • 00:53 it's been very interesting the discussions that we've had for the last couple weeks with different Chinese government entities.
  • 00:58 They've had very specific questions.
  • 01:00 So for example, they have said
  • 01:02 what kind of products, if they stop coming into China, would halt your operations, right?
  • 01:07 So China is very keen to make sure that their economy continues to operate.
  • 01:11 So they've said what products do you have where there's no replacement that you need to bring in?
  • 01:16 That's one.
  • 01:17 And #2
  • 01:18 you know, what are the actual codes?
  • 01:20 So very clearly they've been
  • 01:23 collecting information specific with tariff codes,
  • 01:25 which shows you pretty quickly that's going to go to China tariffs and open up the system.
  • 01:29 And so,
  • 01:30 you know, a number of companies have now been advocating, hey, can we get our products added to the exemption list as well?
  • 01:36 I think officially there has been no de escalation.
  • 01:38 But to your point,
  • 01:39 the way the Chinese government is making exemptions, clearly they don't want their own economy to be harmed by the tariffs that they lay on.
  • 01:47 But they are also clearly looking for what are substitutes for US products, and they're pretty serious about
  • 01:53 this tariff war with the US.