President Biden on Wednesday will call on his trade representative to more than triple some tariffs on steel and aluminum products from China, part of a series of measures aimed at helping protect U.S. manufacturers from a wave of cheap imports.
In a call with the United Steelworkers Union in Pittsburgh, Mr. Biden will ask U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai to raise tariffs to 25 percent on certain Chinese products currently subject to tariffs of 7.5 percent — or no tariffs at all — U.S. officials said .
Mr. Biden will also announce a new Trade Representative investigation into China’s aggressive support of shipbuilders and other related industries, in response to a union complaint. And he will announce new initiatives to work with Mexican officials to prevent China from dodging U.S. steel tariffs by routing its exports through Mexico.
The moves represent an escalating effort by Mr. Biden and his aides to prevent a flood of cheap Chinese exports from undermining American-made products — and endangering a central focus of Mr. Biden’s economic agenda.
These exports, which often benefit from heavy subsidies from Beijing and cheap labor, pushed the Chinese economy to higher-than-expected growth in the first months of the year. But they have raised alarms in the United States and other countries that trade heavily with China, with leaders of those countries accusing Chinese officials of ignoring international trade law and disrupting their own domestic production.
“China is simply too big to play by its own rules,” Lael Brainard, chairman of Biden’s National Economic Council, told reporters.
U.S. officials have increasingly complained about the overcapacity of China’s manufacturing sector, saying subsidies on clean energy products and other manufactured goods give Chinese factories an unfair advantage and distort global markets.
“Thanks to these subsidies, the amount of capacity is exceeding global demand and is likely to exceed it within the next decade,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said Tuesday in remarks accusing the International Monetary Fund of not paying enough attention to the issue.
“When markets weaken, prices fall and it is our companies that go bankrupt, as well as our allied countries,” she said. “Chinese companies continue to receive support to help them stay.”
The Biden administration has balanced these criticisms with diplomatic outreach — and pressure. Ms. Yellen traveled to China last week for several days of meetings with leaders there. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III spoke with his Chinese counterpart on Tuesday for the first time in more than a year, according to news reports.
Late last week, Biden convened a White House security summit with the leaders of Japan and the Philippines, which was intended as a show of unity against China’s military actions in the South China Sea.
Combating China has also become a central issue in Biden’s presidential rematch with former President Donald J. Trump. Both men imposed tariffs and other trade restrictions on factory workers, labor groups and other key voting blocs in the industrial Midwest.
“If a country just rips us off, like China did, I think the tariffs, and the tariffs, forced companies to come back to the United States,” Trump told CNBC in March.
The tariffs that Mr. Biden will propose to raise on Wednesday were initially imposed by Mr. Trump when he was president. Mr. Biden’s trade representative is conducting a four-year review of these tariffs. U.S. officials have said for months that the review is nearing completion, a position they reaffirmed in a call with reporters on Tuesday.
Biden’s stop in Pittsburgh is part of a three-day trip through Pennsylvania, a crucial state he narrowly won in 2020 and has visited more than any other country. The president’s campaign hopes to mobilize support from organized labor, a traditionally Democratic constituency from which Trump has drawn some support.
On Tuesday, Mr. Biden spoke at the local United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners union in Scranton, Pennsylvania, his hometown.
He also launched a series of attacks on Mr. Trump during a campaign speech on taxes earlier in the day, claiming the former president was a pawn of billionaires and no friend of the working class, citing his roots in Scranton.
“Donald Trump looks at the world differently than you and I do,” Mr. Biden said in a speech that signaled his campaign’s intention to turn the 2024 election into a referendum on Mr. Trump. “He wakes up in the morning at Mar-a-Lago and thinks about himself – how he can help his billionaire friends gain power and control, and push their extreme agenda on the rest of us.”
Alan Rappeport And Michael D. Shear reporting contributed.