President Joe Biden has been urged to ban imports of Chinese-made electric cars to the US.
The chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Sherrod Brown, wrote “Chinese electric vehicles are an existential threat to the American auto industry”.
His comments are the strongest yet by any US lawmaker on the issue, while others have called for steep tariffs to keep Chinese electric vehicles (EV) out of the country.
In February, the White House said the US was opening an investigation into whether Chinese cars pose a national security risk. At the time, President Biden said that China’s policies “could flood our market with its vehicles, posing risks to our national security” and that he would “not let that happen on my watch.”
To be fair, the EV market is already somewhat reliant on slave labor in Xinjiang, but Chinese companies especially-so for obvious reasons. Buying cars from Chinese companies means there’s basically no ability to pressure them out of using Xinjiang-sourced lithium.
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in the US actually bans import of products by companies in Xinjiang that can’t prove they don’t use forced labor in their supply chains, so this isn’t a hypothetical harm reduction, either.