STOUGHTON, Wis.— In a cozy, upper Midwestern industrial town, something a little unusual happened on Aug. 30, when representatives from both major parties along with industry and labor representatives came together to recognize a common threat.
“China has a plan to replace the United States, and they’re working on it every single day,” Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.) told The Epoch Times on the factory floor at Stoughton Trailers, a manufacturer of dry vans, grain trailers, and similar products.
“Back in the ‘90s, we built a plant that was making chassis and intermodal containers. All that business went away as the Chinese were subsidizing their market,” Ron Jake, marketing manager of Stoughton Trailers, told The Epoch Times.
They blamed large subsidies to a Chinese state-owned enterprise—China International Marine Containers (Group) Co. Ltd. (CIMC).
“Our companies are competing against Chinese firms that literally cannot go bankrupt or be underpriced,” Mr. Gallagher said. “In the case of Stoughton Trailers, their Chinese competitors were selling products into the [United States] for less than the cost of the raw materials used to produce them. That’s not competition. That is a disease.”
Stoughton Trailers CEO Bob Wahlin said, “CIMC is a key element in the Chinese government strategy to dominate global shipping services and maritime equipment production to secure its status as the world’s factory,” in his remarks to the three committee members, other business leaders concerned about Chinese competition, and United Steelworkers Local 9777 President Steve Kramer.
Mr. Kramer, citing job losses at the Brad Foote Gear Works plant, said, “I see the real-world impact of anti-competitive practices done by the companies based in China.”
Since Tariff, ‘It’s Been Gangbusters’
The Department of Commerce found in Stoughton Trailers’ favor in 2015, determining in an investigation that certain dry containers from China were being sold at less than fair value. Yet, Stoughton Trailers lost a 2015 case against CIMC filed with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC).“We were forced to shut down our container manufacturing operations,” Mr. Wahlin said.
The upshot: On the afternoon of Aug. 23, Mr. Jake led reporters to a full chassis assembly line that, in his words, “did not exist three years ago.”
“Once it was evident [that the duties] were going to go into place, that opened up this market for us, and it’s been gangbusters ever since,” he told The Epoch Times above the din of production.
Stoughton Trailers’ victory is exactly the sort of thing politicians like to show off. Yet, it’s clearly far from the final battle in a complex conflict between the world’s largest and still intertwined economies.
“The tariff itself is just a temporary solution to a bigger problem, which is the CCP’s ongoing economic warfare,” Mr. Gallagher told The Epoch Times.
“A broader solution would be to say to China, ‘Unless you fulfill your [World Trade Organization] obligations, then we’re going to remove permanent normal trade relations.’”
He said that he thinks Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has stood out among the current presidential hopefuls for his stances on China and manufacturing.
“The thing that the CCP fears most is bipartisan support against them,” Mr. LaHood told The Epoch Times.
Mr. LaHood, whose father, Ray LaHood, served in Congress from 1995 through 2009, said worries over China have forged unity among once-disparate factions.
“If you went back 25 years ago, in the U.S. Congress, you used to have three separate groups. You had China hawks, you had economics hawks, and you had human rights hawks. They’ve all found each other now,” he said.
When asked about congressional efforts to address Chinese espionage in the U.S. university system, a vital and vulnerable hub for industrial innovation, Mr. LaHood noted that he, Mr. Krishnamoorthi, and Mr. Gallagher all belong to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
“There'll be more to come on that,” he said while declining to share additional details with The Epoch Times.
Like Mr. LaHood, the Democrat Mr. Krishnamoorthi stressed the power of cooperation across partisan political lines in combating the threat from the CCP.
He told the panel that America’s advantages in innovation were downstream of “freedom—freedom of thought, freedom to invest, freedom to think big.”
“It’s so bad right now, the squelching of freedom by the Chinese Communist Party, that their economy is in a tailspin,” Mr. Krishnamoorthi said.
Mr. Krishnamoorthi declined to speak with The Epoch Times after the panel, citing a tight schedule.
‘Learn to Code’ Not Enough
Multiple panelists emphasized the need for better and more targeted vocational training in the domestic manufacturing sector.“Congress should support collective bargaining agreements which have job training language—what we call internal apprenticeships,” Mr. Kramer said.
At Stoughton Trailers, a highly automated bending machine made by the German firm Trumpf shared a factory floor with workers pushing a partly completed chassis further down the production line.
“The students that we have coming from school today, in high school, are often trained more in coding, which is useful to us, but a majority of those students don’t have the combination of the physical skills and the mental skills to really take on the positions and grow our business, grow our workforce,” Jim Myers, technical director at MetalTek International, told the panel.
Mr. Myers, who said that his company provides specialized components to the Navy, Air Force, Marines, and “other challenging industries,” told The Epoch Times that he came away from the panel thinking about “getting a common vision of where we want the United States to be.”
He pointed out stacks of tubing in front of him—“Hopefully, it’s made in the United States,” he said.
“Do we want to do that, or do we want to write code?
“I think the answer is we need them both. We need that to sustain the country.”
John Panetti, president of industrial pipe fabricator Team Industries, told the panel that workforce quality isn’t the only thing on his radar.
“We do have a manpower shortage right now, but my No. 1 concern is U.S. security,” Mr. Panetti said.
He speculated on what might happen “if we would ever come into a conflict with China, and one of ours were hit.”
“We need the strong base of the foundry people,” he said.
“If we lose that to China and they control that, that is going to be a major, major issue in this country.”
