On December 2, 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) issued an import detention or Withhold Release Order (WRO) against cotton produced by Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) based on information that reasonably indicated XPCC used forced labor within its cotton supply chains. This action comes after CBP issued…
On November 12, 2020, President Trump issued an Executive Order (E.O.) prohibiting U.S. persons from engaging in any transaction (defined as a “purchase for value”) of publicly traded securities, or transacting in financial products that are derivative of, or provide investment exposure to, securities of designated Communist Chinese military companies…
Over the course of the Obama and Trump administrations, U.S. officials have found new ways to incorporate human rights concerns into sanctions and export control policies. Recent announcements by the Commerce and State Departments address how, by the U.S. government in its licensing approvals, and private companies in their foreign-sales…
On September 15, 2020, a World Trade Organization (“WTO”) panel found that the Trump Administration’s unilateral tariffs imposed on Chinese products violated WTO rules regarding nondiscrimination and import tariff rates agreed to by the United States. The dispute concerned China’s challenge to the Trump Administration’s tariffs imposed pursuant to the…
On September 14, 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) issued five Withhold Release Orders (WROs) for a range of goods produced in the Xinjiang region of China. Under 19 U.S.C. § 1307, CBP can initiate enforcement actions for products made wholly or “in part” by forced or indentured labor—defined…
On September 18, 2020, the U.S. Commerce Department published two rules defining the scope of prohibited transactions related to the mobile applications, WeChat and TikTok. The scope of prohibited transactions clarified the two parallel executive orders (EOs) issued by the Trump administration on August 6, 2020, which required the Commerce…
On August 17, 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) made available for public inspection a final rule expanding restrictions on Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. and its non-U.S. affiliates on the BIS Entity List (collectively “Huawei”). In the final rule, BIS announced a further expansion…
On August 6, 2020, President Trump issued a pair of executive orders targeting China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd. (Tencent) and its mobile application WeChat and ByteDance Ltd. (ByteDance) and its mobile application TikTok. The orders instructed the U.S. Commerce Department to prohibit the following within 45 days from their issuance (by…
The U.S. government has issued several rules aimed at excluding, and in some cases removing, Chinese-origin equipment from U.S. telecommunications networks. Most of these rules apply to U.S. government networks, but some extend to private sector telecom infrastructure and services with no nexus to the U.S. government. Wireline Competition Bureau…