After the West, it is now Southeast Asian nations’ turn to impose hefty duties on cheap Chinese goods dumped in their markets, the first since the two sides signed the Framework Agreement on Comprehensive Economic Cooperation in November 2002.
While giving a severe jolt to Beijing, Indonesia has planned to impose a 200% tariff on imported fabrics from China, it is also considering slapping new duties on imports of cheap ceramics, clothing, shoes, cosmetics, and electronics from the East Asian nation.
Indonesia’s labour-intensive sectors have suffered massively due to dumping of China-made products.
For instance, the textile sector which employs around 3.9 million people in Indonesia has been almost ruined on account of dumping of cheap and heavily subsidised Chinese clothes.
Since 2019, 36 textile factories in the Southeast
Asian country have shut down their operations, while 31 others have undertaken massive lay-offs, South China Morning Post quoted Indonesia’s Nusantara Trade Union Confederation as saying.
This year, around 49,000
workers in the textile, garment and footwear sectors have been laid off in Indonesia as factories have pulled down the shutters in provinces of West Java, Central Java and Banten, Nikkei Asia said.
This year, between January and May, Sritex laid-off 3,000 workers, or 23% of its total workforce, South China Morning Post said.
Malaysia, which has a close trade relation with China, with total trade between the two countries last year reaching 450.84 billion ringgit ($98.90 billion), imposed a 10% tariff on imported goods bought online from China under 500 ringgit ($108) in January 2024.
To protect small-and medium-sized enterprises from unfair trade practices of China, Malaysia’s Trade Ministry plans to present anti-dumping legislation to the parliament next year, considering cheap Chinese products that hurt local businesses.
Even as these South Asian countries, which are part of the ASEAN, are doing what they can do to provide relief to their domestic retaliators and manufacturers from flooding of discounted Chinese products in their markets, Thailand is worried about widening trade deficit with China.
A glut of cheap Chinese goods—from apparel to electronic devices to vegetables and steel and aluminium in Thailand has seen Bangkok’s trade deficit with Beijing rise to a record $36.6 billion in 2023, up from $29.2 billion in 2021, said the
Thai Ministry of Commerce.
In July this year, Thailand decided to slap a 7% tariff on import of Chinese goods valued at less than 1,500 baht ($42). Yet what worries Thai businessmen the most is Chinese entrepreneurs’ ability to flood their cheap products in the Southeast Asian country’s market.
Armed with technology and the best mode of production systems, Chinese entrepreneurs engage in mass-scale manufacturing of apparel, footwear, cosmetic products, electronic goods, and other goods and transport them to emerging markets of Southeast Asia
and the world.
E-commerce platforms like Alibaba-backed Lazada and ByteDance’s TikTok have also worked well with Chinese exporters’ strategy to lure Southeast Asian customers towards their cheap goods.
Source: Khabarhub
