A two-month extension of the U.S.-China trade truce, announced in September, has not been written into the Federal Register, leaving the Port of Oakland, California exporters and West Coast carriers planning around a deadline that may or may not hold.
By Staff Reporter
In 19 days, under the only legal text now in force, ships built in China or operated by Chinese companies will again owe fees that can run from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars each time they begin a rotation of American port calls, including at the Port of Oakland.
That is not what the Trump administration has said will happen. On Sept. 23, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the United States and China had agreed to extend their trade truce, known as the Busan arrangement, from Nov. 10 to Jan. 10, 2027. But the truce is a diplomatic understanding. The fee suspension is a legal instrument, set out in a notice the Office of the United States Trade Representative published in the Federal Register last November, and that notice has an expiration date.
As of Wednesday morning, a search of the Federal Register’s records showed no notice from the trade representative’s office extending, modifying or ending the suspension. The office has published 10 documents since Aug. 1 — on sugar quotas, European carbon tariffs, North American trade, Russia’s and China’s compliance with World Trade Organization commitments and other matters — and none concerns the ship fees. No such notice appeared on the register’s current public-inspection list, where documents are posted before publication.
The gap between what Washington has said and what it has written matters most on the West Coast, where trans-Pacific trade arrives, and where California’s farm exporters depend on carriers that would face retaliatory charges in Chinese ports if the American fees return.
What the notice says
The fees grew out of a petition filed in March 2024 by five labor organizations — the United Steelworkers, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Boilermakers, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s Maritime Trades Department — under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. The trade representative found that China had raised its share of global shipbuilding “from less than five percent of global tonnage in 1999, to over 50 percent in 2023,” and controlled production of “over 70 percent of ship-to-shore cranes, 86 percent of intermodal chassis, 95 percent of shipping containers.”
The April 2025 action set three schedules of fees, assessed once per rotation of U.S. port calls and no more than five times a year. Ships owned or operated by Chinese entities would pay $50 per net ton beginning Oct. 14, 2025, rising to $80 on April 17, 2026, and to $140 by 2028. Non-Chinese operators of Chinese-built ships would pay the higher of $18 per net ton or $120 per container discharged, rising to $23 or $153 in April 2026 and to $33 or $250 by 2028. The fee on Chinese-built ships exempted, among others, ships arriving empty, vessels below certain size thresholds and voyages of less than 2,000 nautical miles.
“Ships and shipping are vital to American economic security and the free flow of commerce,” Jamieson Greer, the trade representative, said at the time. “The Trump administration’s actions will begin to reverse Chinese dominance, address threats to the U.S. supply chain, and send a demand signal for U.S.-built ships.”
In October 2025, a modification added 100 percent duties on Chinese-made ship-to-shore cranes and certain other cargo-handling equipment, while exempting cranes bought under contracts signed before April 17, 2025, that enter the country before April 18, 2027.
The fees were collected for less than four weeks. After President Trump and Xi Jinping, China’s leader, met in Busan, South Korea, the trade representative suspended the entire action, fees and crane duties alike. The notice is precise: the suspension runs “through 11:59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on November 9, 2026,” and during that period “no party will accrue liability for or be required to pay the fees.” The notice said the office would “consider whether it is appropriate to continue the suspension period or whether further action is appropriate in advance of the November 10, 2026 suspension deadline.”
The suspension notice does not say which step of the fee schedule would apply if the fees resume. CrossGov, a policy-tracking site, wrote that the April 2026 rates, which never took effect, would become the reference rates — $80 per net ton for a Chinese-operated ship, or about $4 million a call for a 50,000-net-ton vessel by its arithmetic.
Oakland’s stake
For the Port of Oakland, the question is not abstract. The port handled 1,656,999 twenty-foot-equivalent container units in the first nine months of 2026, down 3.5 percent from a year earlier, according to its Oct. 13 cargo report. September brought a rebound — 188,517 units, up 5.4 percent, on 88 vessel calls — but the port remains below last year’s pace.
The port’s own records show how closely its business is tied to COSCO, the Chinese state-owned carrier that the shipping analysts at Alphaliner estimated would be the most exposed to the fees, according to CrossGov. In its November 2025 Maritime News, the port reported that a delegation — Port Board President Andreas Cluver, Oakland City Council President Kevin Jenkins, Maritime Director Bryan Brandes and other staff members — traveled to Shanghai to meet with Qian Ming, deputy managing director of COSCO Shipping Holdings and COSCO Shipping Lines. According to the port’s account, COSCO’s leaders “expressed strong relief over the one-year delay in USTR implementation, noting the fines during the earlier enforcement period had been significant,” and “emphasized the importance of Oakland in their book of business.”
That same newsletter recorded that Oakland had 86 vessel calls in October 2025, the month the fees were briefly in force, down 6.5 percent from a year earlier, which the port described as “consistent with ocean carriers’ ongoing schedule and service network adjustments.” The port did not attribute the decline to the fees, and the figures alone do not establish a link.
The fear of a link is long-standing. When the trade representative first proposed fees of up to $1 million per port call in early 2025, Soren Toft, chief executive of Mediterranean Shipping Company, the world’s largest container line, warned at a conference in Long Beach that carriers would either “revise our network and withdraw coverage” or “add that cost on top.” The California Chamber of Commerce wrote in October 2025 that a coalition it joined had estimated the original proposal would raise shipping costs “by at least 25% ($600–$800 or more).” The final rule’s once-per-rotation structure was intended to blunt that risk; whether it would be enough at higher rates is untested.
Oakland’s cranes carry their own exposure. The Port of Oakland’s crane tariff lists the manufacturer of many of its container cranes as ZPMC, the Shanghai state-owned crane maker. Existing cranes are not affected by the suspended duties, which apply to new imports, but any future replacement of Chinese-made cranes ordered after April 2025 would face a 100 percent duty if the suspension lapses.
The other ships: Chinese fees on American carriers
The Section 301 fees have a mirror image. China’s Ministry of Transport imposed “special port fees” in October 2025 on vessels owned, operated, flagged or built in the United States, and China’s Commerce Ministry sanctioned five American subsidiaries of the South Korean shipbuilder Hanwha Ocean, including the Philly Shipyard. Beijing suspended both measures for one year on the same schedule as Washington. If the American fees return, CrossGov wrote, China’s fees would come back too.
That would reach a carrier founded in San Francisco. Matson, the largest carrier between the West Coast and Hawaii, runs two weekly Hawaii departures from Oakland, according to its annual report for 2025, and one of its vessel strings continues from Honolulu to China before returning to Long Beach. In its third-quarter 2025 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Matson warned that “China has imposed entry fees on certain U.S.-owned or operated, or U.S.-flagged vessels entering Chinese ports, which could result in higher costs.” In its annual report, the company said it had benefited from “a more stable trading environment in the Transpacific tradelane” after the October 2025 deal, which “reduced uncertainty regarding tariffs, port entry fees, global trade and other geopolitical factors.” Its China service volume rose 15.2 percent year over year in the second quarter of 2026, according to its most recent quarterly report.
Who is asking for what
On the day Mr. Bessent announced the truce extension, a coalition of trade groups sent Mr. Greer a letter urging him to extend the suspension “before the current suspension expires.” The World Shipping Council, one of the organizers, counted 209 signatories.
California interests are prominent among them: the California Chamber of Commerce, the California Retailers Association, the California Trucking Association, the California Building Industry Association, the California Walnut Commission, the California Bean Shippers Association, the American Pistachio Growers, the Harbor Trucking Association and the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, among others.
“Resuming the Section 301 vessel fees at this time would add another cost layer to an already strained transportation system,” the letter said. It argued that the year-long suspension “has also demonstrated that vessel fees alone are not a strategy for rebuilding the U.S. shipbuilding industry,” and that exporters, “including agricultural producers,” would benefit from avoiding “the risk of retaliatory or reciprocal measures.”
The other side is equally explicit. In June, Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Mark Kelly of Arizona, both Democrats, urged Mr. Greer to reinstate the fees. “Section 301 port fees [] are critical to revitalizing U.S. shipbuilding,” they wrote, adding of the administration’s maritime strategy: “Without meaningful fees on Chinese vessels, this ‘plan’ is meaningless.” Their office said the prospect of the fees had led to “a 23.5 percent decrease in orders” at Chinese shipyards in nine months. Mr. Kelly is the lead Senate sponsor of the SHIPS for America Act.
The Bay Area’s shipbuilding ambitions
That argument has a Bay Area constituency, too. Representative John Garamendi, a Democrat whose district includes Vallejo, joined Representative Trent Kelly, Republican of Mississippi, in introducing the House version of the SHIPS for America Act. At a March 2025 news conference at the Mare Island Dry Dock with the Machinists union — one of the five Section 301 petitioners — he said, “American shipbuilders have been hampered by unfair trade practices by the Chinese government.”
Mare Island, the Navy’s first permanent West Coast base, has become a test of whether California can share in a shipbuilding revival. In August, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced $8.2 million for a research campus and workforce programs there with Cal Poly Maritime Academy. The site’s owner, the Nimitz Group, has retained JLL to market its roughly 350 acres and four dry docks to shipbuilders. A day before Mr. Newsom’s visit, the Solano County Board of Supervisors voted 3 to 2 to oppose legislation that would have eased a shipbuilding proposal by California Forever near Collinsville, The Vallejo Sun reported.
The tension in California’s position is plain in the documents. The state’s agricultural and retail groups want the fees to stay suspended; its shipbuilding advocates have backed the policy the fees were meant to serve.
What happens next
The administration has several options, and each requires paper. The trade representative could publish a notice extending the suspension to Jan. 10, matching Mr. Bessent’s announcement, or for a longer period; it could let the fees resume; or it could modify the action. Last year, it moved quickly: it requested comments on a suspension on Nov. 6, 2025, and the suspension notice was published Nov. 13, three days after it took effect. A last-minute notice would not be unprecedented.
Nov. 9 is also the expiration date for 178 remaining product exclusions from earlier Section 301 tariffs on Chinese goods, according to US Tariff Rates, a trade-compliance site, which reported on Tuesday that no extension of either instrument had been filed.
The Inquirer found no public statement from the trade representative’s office on its plans for the fees since the truce extension was announced. Its November 2025 notice is the most recent statement of policy in the Federal Register, and it says the office will decide “in advance of the November 10, 2026 suspension deadline.” With less than three weeks left, carriers calling at Oakland and the California growers who fill their ships are planning around that sentence.
