Overnight, China was hit with 104 percent additional tariffs. These tariffs have stacked up quickly: 20 percent tied to Beijing’s role in fentanyl trafficking, 34 percent reciprocal, and another 50 percent was announced this week in response to Beijing’s retaliatory tariffs.
President Trump and Chinese communist leader Xi Jinping are now having a stare-down contest over tariffs.
Some experts told The Epoch Times that the current U.S.-China conflict had gone beyond economics; it was about resetting the international trade protocol and even the world order.
While many world leaders will eventually meet U.S. demands after the initial kicking and screaming, Xi will not—even with the current ultimatum, according to those specialists.
“Xi has sold himself domestically and internationally as the guy standing up to America, and people that want to stand up to America should get in line behind chairman Xi,” Christopher Balding, senior fellow at UK-based think tank the Henry Jackson Society, told The Epoch Times.
“It would be catastrophic for Xi to be seen as caving in to Trump in any way,” Balding added.
Balding said that while Trump announced reciprocal tariffs on a group of countries, including China and allies such as the European Union and Japan, China was Trump’s real target.
The expert said the tariffs are set at a level with other countries to open negotiations, but the China tariffs are so high that they almost inhibit negotiation. Xi would have to make a lot of concessions to bring down the previous 54 percent by half, yet the remaining half would still be too high for China to bear, according to Balding.
Both Balding and Yeh Yao-Yuan, a professor of international studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, think Trump is, in effect, aggressively decoupling from China.
China expert Alexander Liao said Trump had learned lessons from the first term. The United States used to bear the cost of delays, he said, when the communist regime used to draw things out: Two years to reach an agreement and another year to find out that Beijing didn’t honor it.
However, this time, Trump slapped a hefty tariff upfront, so Xi is bearing the cost of delays, said Liao.
The $300 billion U.S. trade deficit with China means that China is hurt and pained much more than the United States. Many Chinese goods are replaceable, and American consumers can find alternatives, probably leading to a significant drop in Chinese exports to the United States.
The Chinese economy has been increasingly reliant on exports. If they are drastically curtailed, China’s manufacturing overcapacity will build up and put enormous pressure on the domestic consumption base, which is yet to recover and spend after the draconian COVID-19 lockdown was lifted in December 2022.
Washington has more cards than Beijing, Liao told The Epoch Times.
In addition to further hiking tariffs, Liao said the United States could apply more pressure to the CCP by uniting with China’s neighbors who do not like the regime, such as Vietnam and India. The United States could also take a human rights approach and release a report about the origins of COVID-19 or publicize evidence of the forced organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience and ethnic minorities in China.
BOOKMARKS
The Internal Revenue Service has agreed to supply tax information to the Department of Homeland Security that may help identify illegal immigrants. Several immigrants’ rights groups filed suit last month to halt this maneuver, but U.S. District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich declined to block it.
The Department of Homeland Security has revoked the legal status of some immigrants who have used the CBP One phone app to enter the country. More than 900,000 immigrants came in through the app, but now a spokesperson for Homeland Security urges them to self-deport, or they “will be found, removed, and permanently barred from reentry.”
The Supreme Court has overturned a lower court’s ruling that ordered the reinstatement of thousands of fired federal employees. U.S. District Judge William Alsup had previously ruled that the 16,000 workers, fired as part of the recent government downsizing, were terminated improperly.
The Senate confirmed Elbridge Colby as undersecretary of defense for policy on April 8, with a vote of 54–45. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was the sole GOP vote against the confirmation, based on his disagreements with Colby’s foreign policy stances on Europe, Ukraine, and the Middle East.
The European Union is expected to issue a ruling in its investigations of Apple and Meta in the coming weeks, and a negative finding could result in massive fines for the two tech giants. The companies are suspected of violating the Digital Markets Act, which purports to encourage market competition, but which a Meta spokesman says are meant “to handicap successful American businesses simply because they’re American.”
—Stacy Robinson
