Hi! I’m back. I just recently returned from two weeks in Kyrgyzstan, and aside from amazing horseback views and freezing yurt nights, I was lucky enough to also catch the opening of the sixth World Nomad Games!
On the evening of August 31, I was at Bishkek Arena for the opening ceremony along with twenty-one heads of state who were in the city for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit running through the next day. Vietnam was represented by its Vice President, Võ Thị Ánh Xuân, who joined them for the ceremony.
Earlier that same day she had been in a meeting with Bakytzhan Sagintayev, who chairs the Board of the Eurasian Economic Commission, asking him to clear the trade barriers the Eurasian Economic Union puts in front of Vietnamese textiles, garments, footwear and leather goods, and to keep an eye on its trade-defense measures on rice.
Nine days later her trade minister repeated one of those asks in Moscow, and added another. What sits between those two meetings is the subject of this issue's Deep Dive, and it turns on a list Vietnam was removed from in 2021.
The Fortnight in Brief: What moved in Hanoi and Washington
Vietnam's ban on importing goods made with forced labor took effect September 5. Nghị định 292/2026/NĐ-CP, signed July 22, replaces Nghị định 69/2018 as the implementing decree for the Law on Foreign Trade Management and puts goods "extracted, produced or manufactured in whole or in part" with forced labor onto the prohibited-import list for the first time in Vietnamese law. Section 2 reads that against the rule the 12.5 percent tariff was set by.
Commerce published preliminary results in the raw honey antidumping review yesterday: 30.21 percent for Ban Me Thuot Honeybee, 39.61 percent for Daklak Honeybee, and 34.91 percent for eight companies not individually examined. Four more companies were preliminarily denied separate rates and fall into the Vietnam-wide entity at 60.03 percent. Case briefs are due 21 days from publication.
The antidumping order on Vietnamese walk-behind lawn mowers is gone. No domestic party filed a substantive response to the sunset review by the July 1 deadline, which under section 751(c)(3)(A) of the Tariff Act left Commerce no discretion. Revocation runs back to July 13, the order's fifth anniversary.
Vietnam's own trade-defense surveillance moved down to the company level. Official Letter 1081/PVTM-TT, issued September 10, asks Customs for exporter names, unit codes, addresses and export values across 67 product categories with unusual US growth. The authority says inclusion implies neither wrongdoing nor any US investigation.
Policy Watch: The criterion Vietnam met six weeks late
Most goods Vietnam ships to the United States carry a 12.5 percent Section 301 duty, and have since July 24. The reason is written down.
How the two rates were set
USTR's final action in the forced-labor Section 301 investigations sets two rates, and the rule separating them is explicit. A 10 percent rate goes to "an economy that imposes a forced labor import prohibition, has committed to impose and enforce such a prohibition through an Agreement on Reciprocal Trade, or has imposed a partial regime with the effect of preventing the importation of certain forced labor goods." For "every other economy," the rate is 12.5 percent.
Seventeen economies are named for the 10 percent rate: Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Canada, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the United Kingdom and Trinidad and Tobago. Five more, among them the European Union and Japan, sit in a separate arrangement capping the Section 301 duty and the most-favored-nation rate together. Vietnam appears at item 60, in the residual category, at a flat 12.5 percent.
Six economies moved before the final action
The notice also names the economies that moved after USTR published its proposed action on June 5 and before the final action on July 23. Six imposed prohibitions in those seven weeks, by the notice's own enumeration: Cambodia, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Sri Lanka and Trinidad and Tobago. A seventh, Jordan, took on commitments through an ART. All seven sit on the 10 percent list.
Vietnam signed Nghị định 292 on July 22, one day before the final action, and brought it into force on September 5. For the six weeks in between it existed on paper and not in law, which is neither condition the notice discusses. As of September 5, Vietnam does what the first clause of USTR's own rule describes: it imposes a forced labor import prohibition.
Whether a decree on the books is enough
The obvious objection is enforcement. USTR's June 2 determinations assessed two things, whether an economy imposes a prohibition and whether it enforces one, and Vietnam's decree has been in force for ten days with nothing done under it yet. The notice answers that objection itself. USTR put Vietnam among 54 economies that failed on both counts. Four failed only on enforcement. Canada, the European Union, Mexico and Pakistan each hold a prohibition of their own that USTR found they do not effectively enforce, and all four pay 10 percent or its net-of-MFN equivalent. Failing the enforcement half cost none of them the lower rate.
Satisfying the text is the easy half. Vietnam's decree names no enterprises, no countries and no territories, and sets no evidentiary triggers, so there is nothing yet to point to. Nor is there an obvious place to point it. The notice set every rate in one determination in July and describes no procedure for moving an economy between tiers afterward. Vietnam now satisfies the condition USTR wrote down for the lower rate, which is imposing a forced-labor import prohibition. The difference is 2.5 percentage points on most of what it ships to the United States, and the route to acting on it runs through MOIT and the industry associations rather than any form an exporter can file.
The meeting in Bishkek and the one in Moscow nine days later, the 2021 decision that explains why Vietnam keeps getting swept into other countries' trade remedies, two official trade figures that don't match, the seven-row Tracker, and this fortnight's coffee, seafood and durian numbers.
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