Face masks among Chinese exports given four-month US trade war tariff reprieve

Disposable face masks, respirators, Bluetooth tracking devices and musical instruments are among the Chinese exports granted a new short-term exemption to trade war tariffs by the United States, its trade department announced on Tuesday.

The products on List 1 of the Section 301 tariff action against China had been exempted on September 1, 2019, for one year. But the reprieve has been extended just four months, until the end of 2020. The Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) did not explain why the extension period was shortened, in a note published on the Federal Register, the official journal of the federal government that contains government agency rules, proposed rules and public notices.

Other items on the exclusion list include LCD display units, binoculars, postage stamps and earth-drilling machinery. This is one of eight lists of exempted products issued under the USTR’s product-exclusion process, launched last year.

Illustrating how disparate and miscellaneous the dozens of listed items are, the exemptions also include “tufts of swine hair bristles, oriented with the soft feather tipped ends of the hairs facing up and the hard, root ends of the hairs facing down, with the root ends of the hairs glued together to form a round bottom not more than 7mm in diameter” and “brushes of natural goat hair bristles, which are in lengths of at least 30mm but not more than 33mm”.

Trade, initially the primary area on which US President Donald Trump attacked China, has been viewed in recent weeks as one of the few areas of constructive dialogue between the world’s two largest economies, with the superpower relationship descending into what is widely billed as a “new cold war”.