The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party will be in manufacturing-dependent Wisconsin Wednesday afternoon for a roundtable discussion on communist China’s “deliberate undermining of American manufacturing,” according to a press release.
Committee Chairman Mike Gallagher (R-WI-08) and Ranking Member Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL-08) will host the roundtable beginning at 3 p.m. Wednesday in Stoughton, Wisconsin. The event will be broadcast on the Select Committee’s social media and website.
Bob Wahlin, CEO of Stoughton Trailers, and Steve Kramer, president of United Steelworkers, Local 9777, will join other stakeholders in sharing their experiences.
Stoughton Trailers, which manufactures semi-truck trailers and intermodal container chassis at its plants in Wisconsin, Texas, and Mississippi, knows all too well the threat the People’s Republic of China poses to U.S. manufacturing. According to the committee, the company’s business was undermined by PRC state-owned enterprise CMIC, which began selling PRC-manufactured chassis to the U.S. for less than the price of the raw materials to produce the same chassis domestically.
Stoughton Trailers and the Coalition of American Chassis Manufacturers initiated a successful anti-dumping and countervailing duty case against CMIC. The Wisconsin company won its case in 2020, with the U.S. government issuing a 44.32 percent countervailing tariff. The tariff imposed duties on Chinese chassis and subassemblies for a minimum of five years.
The U.S. chassis manufacturing industry has been “devastated” by Chinese imports in the past decade, with layoffs of “hundreds of thousands of workers,” attorney Robert E. DeFrancesco told freightwaves.com. DeFrancesco’s firm, Wiley Rein, represented Stoughton Trailers, one of five intermodal chassis makers in the anti-dumping case against China.
“This is a really big win for the U.S. industry,” DeFrancesco said at the time. Stoughton’s intermodal chassis operation had been “completely shut down and now they are trying to hire a third shift to bring back the production,” he told the publication.
Since then, as a result of the tariffs imposed on imported chassis, Stoughton has added a production line in Wisconsin, built a new manufacturing facility in Texas, and started a manufacturing operation in Mississippi with a manufacturing partner, creating hundreds of jobs for American workers, according to the committee.
The Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party has been among the more active bodies in Congress since its creation in January. On Tuesday, The Washington Post published an op-ed by Gallagher headlined, “Americans are Unwittingly Financing the CCP. It has to Stop.” In it, the congressman notes he and Krishnamoorthi are investigating major U.S. investment companies and venture capital firms for funding Chinese companies that the U.S. government has blacklisted because of national security concerns or the companies’ involvement in human rights abuses.
“What we’ve found so far is troubling,” Gallagher wrote.
Financial giants such as MSCI and BlackRock funnel U.S. money to companies that produce the CCP’s military needs, he noted. Investment in these Chinese companies “is rampant across Wall Street and Silicon Valley.”
Last month, President Joe Biden signed an executive order directing the Treasury Department to issue rules restricting some U.S. investment in PRC companies working on artificial intelligence, semiconductors and quantum computing. Gallagher said it was a good first step, but there’s yet much to be done.
“We are quite literally funding our own potential destruction — and the executive order, while well-intentioned, won’t stop it. It is up to Congress to erect strong, enduring guardrails around outbound investment in China,” the congressman wrote.
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
