A new set of steep tariff increases on certain Chinese goods will not take effect on August 1 as originally planned, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said Tuesday.

The agency, which is still reviewing numerous comments received after the policy was announced, will finalize the tariffs two weeks after that review is completed.

The tariffs would have hit specific sectors of the Chinese economy particularly hard, quadrupling the duty paid on Chinese electric vehicles and sharply increasing the charge on Chinese-manufactured batteries and semiconductors.

The announcement came a little more than a week after President Joe Biden announced he was dropping his reelection bid, and Democratic support coalesced behind Vice President Kamala Harris.

There was no suggestion that the delay was related to the change at the top of the Democratic ticket. However, the announcement did highlight the fact that there are many unanswered questions about what Harris’ policy on China trade would be and how it will contrast with an extremely aggressive path laid out by former President Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s nominee.

Harris on trade

In her 3½ years as vice president, Harris has not focused on trade issues. However, some sense of her attitude toward the question can be gleaned by votes she cast as a member of the Senate and her past public comments.

Harris said in a 2019 appearance that she is not a “protectionist Democrat,” meaning she does not favor policies that shield U.S. companies from overseas competition. However, she has taken some stances that suggest she is at least skeptical of free trade orthodoxy.

As a senator, she voted against the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), a trade deal that broke down barriers to cross-border trade in North America. She has also said she would have voted against other free trade agreements, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which the USMCA replaced in 2020, and the Obama administration-driven Trans-Pacific Partnership. In several of those cases, Harris has said she objected because she felt the agreements did not contain sufficient environmental protections.

New priority

“Vice President Harris has not had a lot to say about trade policy, either as vice president or as a senator,” William Reinsch, the Scholl chair in international business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told VOA in an email exchange. “That suggests it has not been a high priority for her — most of her focus has been on domestic issues.

“However, it has long been a high priority for Donald Trump, who brings up trade issues every chance he gets,” Reinsch added. “That will force her to respond during the campaign. When she does, I don’t expect a policy much different than Biden’s. That is particularly true with respect to China, where both candidates will find it in their interest to advocate a tough line.”

Both Harris and Biden have been highly critical of the broad sanctions on Chinese goods that Trump imposed during his term in office. Harris has described them as a tax on ordinary Americans because they raise the cost of goods. However, the Biden administration has mainly left the Trump-era tariffs in place since taking office nearly four years ago.

Trump on trade

For years, Trump has been an advocate of highly protectionist trade policies, particularly toward China, and there is every reason to believe that if he were to return to the White House, he would work to implement even more severe restrictions on imports from China.

On the campaign trail, he has been advocating imposing blanket tariffs on all goods and services coming into the United States — a 10% levy on goods from most other countries, but a whopping 60% tariff on Chinese goods.

“Unlike other policy statements that Trump is making on the campaign trail, I take this one seriously,” said Matthew P. Goodman, director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies.

“I think on trade, he means what he says,” Goodman told VOA. “When he says he's going to impose 60%-plus tariffs on imports from China and 10% tariffs on things from Europe and Japan, I think he is going to try to do that. If you want to call it American protectionism, I think that's fair.”

‘Sharp decoupling’

Jeff Schott, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told VOA that given a second term in office, Trump would move to broadly disrupt U.S.-China trade.

While there is broad bipartisan agreement in the United States that Washington needs to take action to prevent China from engaging in specific abusive practices, such as dumping goods at artificially low costs to deter competition, Schott said Trump appears to want to take things further.

“Trump has been calling for a sharp decoupling of our two economies. I think Trump would try to block more Chinese investment in the United States [and would] also impose more across-the-board tariffs,” Schott said.

Continuity with Biden

Experts told VOA that while it is possible that a Harris administration would break significantly with the Biden administration on China trade policies, the most likely near-term outcome would be maintaining the status quo.

“I think there will be a very high degree of continuity between the Biden policies and President Kamala Harris's policies, if we have a President Harris,” said Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

“There was continuity between President Trump and President Biden, and this is because the basic problem set that any president faces vis-a-vis China is the same,” Daly told VOA.

“It's a function of geostrategic realities that a President Harris must also face,” he said. “I think that she will continue to strengthen alliances. She will continue, as she has said, to try to ‘de-risk’ in China. We know that when she ran for president in 2020, she was fairly tariff averse. Like President Biden, she seems to have changed her mind about that.”

VOA White House bureau chief Patsy Widakuswara contributed to this story.