26. Trade · Minor · Contested — excluded from counts
Adopt a multi-pronged China strategy
Printed page 801 26. Trade · from “The Case for Free Trade”
“Adopt a multi-pronged China strategy to convince the Chinese government to reform its illiberal human rights and trade policies.”
What has happened
- Partially done
The strategy is in operation and has produced a negotiated instrument. Executive Order 14358 modified reciprocal tariff rates "consistent with the Economic and Trade Arrangement Between the United States and the People's Republic of China", the settlement reached after a year of tariff escalation, export controls and Section 301 action; USTR had opened a Section 301 investigation of China's Phase One compliance on 2025-10-28, imposed action on China's semiconductor industry on 2025-12-29, and on 2026-06-05 asked for comments on the scope and operation of a standing "mechanism to promote reciprocal managed trade with China". This is `partial` and not `done` because the Quote asks for a strategy aimed at China's "illiberal human rights *and* trade policies", and no instrument in the window is addressed to the human-rights half: the Section 301 forced-labor campaign of 2026 runs against 60 economies on an import-enforcement theory, not against Beijing's domestic practices.
- Executive Order 14358: Modifying Reciprocal Tariff Rates Consistent With the Economic and Trade Arrangement Between the United States and the People's Republic of China
- USTR: Notice of Action — China's Acts, Policies, and Practices Related to Targeting of the Semiconductor Industry for Dominance
- USTR: Request for Comments on the Scope and Operation of a Mechanism To Promote Reciprocal Managed Trade With China
- Attempted
Section 3 of the Presidential Memorandum "America First Trade Policy" set out a multi-pronged China review on the trade side of the Quote: USTR to review the Phase One Economic and Trade Agreement for compliance, to assess the 2024 four-year review of the Section 301 tariffs and consider further modifications, and to investigate other Chinese acts, policies and practices; Commerce and USTR to assess legislative proposals on Permanent Normal Trade Relations; Commerce to assess reciprocity in intellectual property. Nothing had moved on the date of the memorandum.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
- Contested Recommendation from “The Case for Free Trade”, and the one place in the chapter where the two Positions ask for something close to the same thing by opposite means. The Fair Trade essay’s China package (#2076–#2093, printed pp. 789–790) asks for blanket tariffs and decoupling; this Quote asks for a strategy that “convinces the Chinese government to reform”. The same instruments — the Section 301 campaign, the export controls, the 2025 arrangement — are Evidence for both, read differently: as decoupling for the Fair Trade items, as leverage for reform here. Neither item’s Status was moved because the other Position advanced.
- Leveled partial rather than done on the two-object test in §3b: the trade half of the Quote’s purpose has instruments, the human-rights half has none.
- #2108, on the same printed page, takes the allied-pressure and cultural-engagement half of the same subject and is leveled separately.
- Action
- create
- Object
- Multi-pronged U.S. China strategy
- ID
- 2105