The Chinese government has hiked levies and import duties on goods from the United States of America (USA) by an astronomical percentage of 125%.
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This comes in retaliation to the Donald Trumps decision to raise tariffs on China to 145%.
China dismissed the U.S. president’s tariff strategy as “a joke” for attempting to hit the world’s No.2 economy with higher duties.
“The U.S. side’s imposition of excessively high tariffs on China seriously violates international economic and trade rules, runs counter to basic economic principles and common sense, and is simply an act of unilateral bullying and coercion,” China’s Finance Ministry said in a statement.
The tit-for-tat increases stand to make goods trade between the world’s two largest economies impossible, analysts say, with import duties above around 35% wiping out Chinese exporters’ profit margins and making American offerings in China similarly overly expensive.
“Even if the U.S. continues to impose even higher tariffs, it would no longer have any economic significance and would go down as a joke in the history of world economics,” the Finance Ministry’s statement added.
“If the U.S. continues to play a numbers game with tariffs, China will not respond,” it added. However it left the door open for Beijing to turn to other types of retaliation, reiterating that China would fight the U.S. to the end.
China has further taken a stance to with immediate effect restrict imports of Hollywood movies.
Beijing is seeking to rally trading partners to its cause.
In his first public comments on the tariffs, President Xi Jinping told Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez during a meeting in Beijing that China and the European Union should “fulfill their international responsibilities… and jointly oppose unilateral acts of bullying”, China’s state news agency Xinhua reported.
