The U.S. Congress has swiftly passed a bill to amend the tariff act for applying countervailing duties (CVDs) on imports from China and Vietnam -- another major move to enhance trade protectionism. Analysts said the move originated in the rising U.S. campaign fever and might damage China-U.S. trade relations.

INCREASING PROTECTIONISM

The U.S. House of Representatives voted 370 to 39 Tuesday to restore the U.S. Department of Commerce's capability to impose duties on subsidized goods from so-called "non-market economy (NME) countries" like China and Vietnam. This came just one day after the legislation was approved in the Senate and several days after a senior trade official called on the bill to be introduced.

The bill, which overturned a recent federal court ruling, was waiting for President Barack Obama's signature before becoming law.

In December 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled out the bill, saying the Commerce Department did not have legal authority to impose CVDs on goods from NME countries. The court explained that government payments can't be characterized as "subsidies" in an NME context.

Now as the bill had passed, the Obama administration shored up its trade enforcement capability. Yet the newly-passed bill was just one of many recent trade-related political moves against major U.S. trade partners.

In the past several weeks, Obama signed an executive order to establish an interagency trade enforcement center to investigate unfair trade practices. For example, the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) launched dozens of investigations into patent-infringement cases, and the U.S. International Trade Administration (USITA) started three anti-dumping and countervailing investigations. From time to time, Congress held various hearings on Chinese currency issues and alleged unfair trade practices.

All told, as of Feb. 21, 2012, the U.S. Commerce Department had 285 anti-dumping (AD) and CVD orders in place, among which were 114 AD and CVD orders on imports of a wide range of Chinese products, including consumer goods, steel products, agricultural products, seafood, and chemicals. Also, the USITC instituted 69 investigations in 2011 on patent-infringement cases, hitting a historic high for the second straight year.

JUMPING ON THE PROTECTIONIST BANDWAGON

The increasing trade frictions came as a surprise as the U.S. economy had kept recovering for ten consecutive quarters and the unemployment rate had slipped to a three-year low.

It was also unusual to see an overwhelming number of votes from both the Democratic and the Republican parties for an issue within a timeframe as short as a week.

That's because it's about trade, an issue on which both sides hope to win over voters in the election year by acting as defenders of the public interest.

"Protectionism is a concern at all time because it's very tempting for people to resort to," Stewart Baker, former assistant secretary of the U.S. Homeland Security Department and now partner of the Washington-based Steptoe & Johnson LLP, told Xinhua.

It's also because the bill was passed on "Super Tuesday," when as many as 10 states would show their preference among Republican presidential candidates. It was a milestone that marked a campaign culmination before the national election.

This year, Americans will decide whether Obama or his Republican contender should lead them in the next four years. Over the same period, voters will decide on the future of the political careers of one third of Senate members and all of their House peers.

"The president's new trade enforcement unit is a purely political exercise and not at all helpful," Derek Scissors, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation's Asian Studies Center, told Xinhua.

"If the unit doesn't do anything, if it just talks, it's okay. If it actually takes action, that would be unfortunate, because it is politically timed," he said.

The U.S. politicians' choice of protecting jobs in America over promoting free trade around the world indicated the campaign fever had impaired their wisdom.

Trade protectionism is widely regarded as short-sighted, and some U.S. officials and analysts believe that a deeper trade integration into other regions could help the United States create more jobs and improve its competitiveness.

HURTING TRADE RELATIONS

As China and the United States have grown increasingly interdependent on each other in terms of economy, trade disputes have also increased. But some economists warned that the Obama administration's protectionist move will ultimately hurt U.S.-China trade relations as these are becoming increasingly important during the gradual recovery of the world economy. Without a doubt, the recent wave of U.S. trade protectionism will add uncertainty to the world economy with Europe's sovereign debt crisis far from being over.

"Emerging markets like China are doing so much better. You are going to fix the reality that the developed world is not going to be more protectionist and less open. The irony is the developing countries are turning out to be more supportive of an open trade system," Yukon Huang, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Xinhua.

Based on 2010 U.S. trade data, roughly 13.4 billion dollars of U.S. imports from China were affected that year.

"The U.S. must stop taking decisions against China, even small ones, without putting forth an explicit trade policy, which we have thus far failed to do," Scissors said.

Some U.S. industry groups have already sensed the coming pains of protectionism. The imposition of 100-percent tariffs on imported solar PV cells and modules from China will "result in as many as 50,000 net lost jobs in the U.S. over the next three years" said a study commissioned by the Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy (CASE), which is a coalition of U.S. solar companies representing 97 to 98 percent of solar industry jobs.

"The Obama administration said imports are a bad thing. This is just a mistake," Scissors said.