This is (probably?) related to the de minimis exemption, so here is the section of Project 2025 which provides bullet points for dealing with that:
- Stop Communist China’s abuse of the so-called de minimis exemption, which allows it to evade the tariffs for products valued at less than $800.
- Reinvigorate and expand the DHS crackdown on the CCP’s use of e-sellers (including third-party sellers) and the shippers and operators of major warehouses such as Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba to flood U.S. markets with counterfeit and pirated goods.
- Strategically expand tariffs to all Chinese products and increase tariff rates to levels that will block out “Made in China” products, and execute this strategy in a manner and at a pace that will not expose the U.S. to lack of access to essential products like key pharmaceuticals.
- Systematically reduce and eventually eliminate any U.S. dependence on Communist Chinese supply chains that may be used to threaten national security such as medicines, silicon chips, rare earth minerals, computer motherboards, flatscreen displays, and military components.
- Significantly reduce or eliminate the issuance of visas to Chinese students or researchers to prevent espionage and information harvesting.
- Prohibit the use of Communist Chinese–made drones in American airspace.
- Provide significant financial and tax incentives to American companies that are seeking to onshore production from Communist China to U.S. soil.
- Prohibit Communist Chinese state-owned enterprises from bidding on U.S. government procurement contracts (for example, contracts for subway and other transportation systems).
- Ban all Chinese social media apps such as TikTok and WeChat, which pose significant national security risks and expose American consumers to data and identity theft.
- Prohibit all Communist Chinese investment in high-technology industries.
- Prohibit U.S. pension funds from investing in Communist Chinese stocks.
- Delist any Communist Chinese stocks that do not meet Public Company Accounting Oversight Board standards or, alternatively, close off the Chinese “A shares” stock market to U.S. investment and deregister U.S.-sanctioned Communist Chinese companies.
- Prohibit the use of Hong Kong clearinghouses as transit points for American capital investing in the Chinese mainland.
- Prohibit the inclusion of Chinese sovereign bonds in U.S. investors’ portfolios.
- Sanction any companies, including American companies like Apple, that facilitate Communist China’s use of its Great Firewall surveillance and censorship capabilities.
- Order the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Justice to contract with U.S.-owned and U.S.-operated artificial intelligence companies that are capable of detecting, identifying, and disrupting both the domestic groups’ and CCP influencers’ social media operations and funding streams using public information as a rapidly available offensive measure.
- Compel the closure of all Confucius Institutes in the U.S., which serve as propaganda arms of the CCP.
- Hold the CCP accountable for the COVID-19 virus, which almost certainly originated as a genetically engineered virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and do so through the establishment of a presidential commission or select congressional committee that would investigate the origins of the virus; its various costs, both economically and in human life; and the possible means of collecting damages from the CCP, which are likely to rise to the trillions of dollars.
Some of this was already done by the EU and UK in the last few years. The de-minimis exemption equivalent was removed [1], but with over a year's notice which allowed time for logistics companies and their clients to develop software to pay the required taxes. (If I browse Ali Express from Denmark, I see prices including 25% Danish VAT.)
Honestly, most of this doesn't sound like a bad idea from a strategic perspective, although there will be a lot of pain along the way. Once we get down towards the bottom of the list, there are some items which are almost guaranteed to be unconstitutional, or are a bit ridiculous, but in general the US and the West in general is very over-reliant on Chinese manufactured goods and this puts at a strategic disadvantage as China becomes a more serious geopolitical adversary, reducing or eliminating that reliance is just good sense.
Is this all improvised or was there a big list of stuff to do ahead of time?
If the latter, does anyone have a copy of that list?
Alternatively, is anyone keeping track of what's already been done so far?