On Friday, China responded to the latest US tariffs by imposing 125 percent tariffs on imports of all US goods.
China said it would raise tariffs on US goods to 125 percent from 84 percent, hours after President Xi Jinping urged the European Union to join hands with Beijing in resisting “unilateral bullying,” referring to the massive tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump.
China has also filed a lawsuit with the WTO following the latest US tariff hikes, the Chinese commerce ministry said, according to a report in the official Xinhua Agency. Also, in his first public remarks on the US-China trade war, Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday said, “There is no winner in a tariff war, and going against the world will only result in self-isolation.”
According to Xinhua, he made the remarks during his meeting with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez in Beijing today. Xi further called on China and the EU to fulfill their international responsibilities, work together to safeguard economic globalization and the international trading environment, and jointly resist unilateral bullying.
The Chinese finance ministry said further US action will be ignored because “at the current tariff level, there is no possibility of market acceptance for US goods exported to China.”
“The United States’ imposition of round upon round of abnormally high tariffs on China has become a numbers game with no practical significance in economics,” it said.
A spokesperson said, “If the US continues to play the tariff numbers game, China will ignore it. ”
The Chinese Customs Tariff Commission of the State Council today said that given that there is no longer any possibility of market acceptance for US goods exported to China under the current tariff levels, if the US side subsequently continues to impose tariffs on Chinese goods exported to the US, the Chinese side will not respond to any further tariffs imposed by the United States.
“Even if the US imposes even higher tariffs, it would no longer make economic sense and ultimately go down as a joke in world economic history,” according to the commission, as reported in the Chinese state media.
According to the White House, the current US tariffs on Chinese imports include a 145 per cent duty on all products imported from China. China said that the “excessively high tariffs” imposed by US President Donald Trump “seriously violates international economic and trade rules, goes against basic economic laws and common sense, and are nothing but unilateral bullying and coercion.”
However, the commission added that should the US persist in substantially undermining China’s interests, China will take firm countermeasures and fight to the end.
On April 10, Trump paused most of the tariffs for 90 days, but for China, the tariffs were hiked to 145 per cent. Trump blamed Beijing’s retaliatory actions—including hiking the tariff rate to 84 per cent—and announced an immediate increase in US tariffs on Chinese imports to 125 per cent, on top of the 20 per cent rate the president had previously imposed on China, bringing the total tariff to 145 per cent.
