U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaks during a Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing in Washington, DC, U.S., Thursday, February 5, 2026.
Kent Nishimura | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The United States launched new trade investigations into 60 economies on Thursday to determine whether it had failed to curb imports of goods made with forced labor, a day after launching an unfair trade practices probe against 16 trading partners.
The new investigations, conducted under Section 301(b) of the Trade Act of 1974, include China, the European Union, India and Mexico, according to a statement from the U.S. Trade Representative.
“Despite international consensus against forced labor, governments have failed to impose and effectively enforce measures barring goods produced with forced labor from entering their markets,” said U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.
“These investigations will determine whether foreign governments have taken sufficient steps to prohibit the importation of goods produced with forced labor and how the failure to eradicate these abhorrent practices affects American workers and businesses,” he said.
Section 301 allows the United States to impose tariffs on countries that have engaged in unfair trade practices without authorization from Congress – a legal authority that US President Donald Trump used during his first term to impose tariffs on Chinese goods.
Forced labor investigations follow Section 301 Investigations launched on Wednesday, which targeted excess industrial capacity in 16 economies, including China, Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland and Thailand.
The latest investigations have expanded the list of countries subject to Section 301 review to include more countries such as the United Kingdom, Brazil and Russia.
The new investigations appear to serve as an alternative route to replacing at least part of the “reciprocal tariffs” that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down last month.
“By eliminating reciprocal tariffs, the administration has made clear that its Plan B will be deployed sooner rather than later,” said Wendy Cutler, vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute and former U.S. trade representative.
The Supreme Court invalidated Trump’s reciprocal tariffs last month, ruling that the president had exceeded his powers. Trump then immediately imposed a 10% global tariff based on Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, and threatened to increase it further to 15%.
The scale of the surveys has focused the attention of business experts on their feasibility and justification.
The U.S. Trade Representative will hold hearings on the investigations from April 28 to May 1 — an “unrealistic” deadline given the breadth of countries subject to surveillance, said Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation.
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Targeting the European Union, which has adopted its own legislative framework prohibiting forced labor practices, while sparing countries with significantly weaker enforcement, “doesn’t make sense,” Elms said.
The scale of trade investigations also risks alienating partners and wasting the goodwill needed to forge a collective response to address China’s industrial overcapacity, experts say.
“The administration is losing an important opportunity to work with partners to solve the world’s real problem of overcapacity,” [which is] China,” Cutler said.
“By involving more than a dozen countries in an investigation into excess capacity, our partners will be in no mood to work with us to address the serious challenges that China’s excess capacity presents globally,” she added.
China in the crosshairs? The investigations come as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is expected to meet his Chinese counterpart He Lifeng in Paris this weekend to continue trade and economic negotiationsand weeks before a meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“China will not take this as good news and will use the upcoming meeting in Paris to express its dissatisfaction,” said Stephen Olson, a visiting senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute and a former U.S. trade negotiator.
But both sides appear determined to keep the Trump-Xi meeting on track: “I wouldn’t expect it to upset the apple cart,” Olson said.
In response to the U.S. investigation into excess capacity under Section 301, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said in a press briefing on Thursday that Beijing is opposed to any form of unilateral tariff measures.
“Launching new trade investigations just before the summit sends the wrong signal,” said Wang Huiyao, founder of the Center for China and Globalization, a think tank often seen as aligned with Beijing thinking.
“A unilateral approach won’t work. Article 301 has already been tried, and what both sides need now is to find a way to work together, including on what’s happening in the Middle East,” he added.
Launch of the first Trump administration six investigations under section 301investigations into China and the European Union having led to increases in customs duties. The Biden administration has also conducted Section 301 investigations, and two survey on Brazil and China remain in progress.
