WASHINGTON—As part of a bold shift in U.S. trade policy, President Donald Trump has ramped up tariffs on Chinese goods, aiming to revive domestic manufacturing and hold Beijing accountable for its decades of market-distorting practices.
At the April 2 “Make America Wealthy Again” event in the White House Rose Garden, Trump unveiled the contours of his global tariff plans, including a 34 percent reciprocal levy on Beijing. The president pointed to China’s currency manipulation and other non-monetary trade barriers.
This decision effectively raised the total new tariffs on China to 54 percent, including the 20 percent levies previously imposed to pressure Beijing into reducing the flow of fentanyl into the United States.
This move will impact the approximately $600 billion in annual trade and bring tariffs on nearly all Chinese goods close to the 60 percent rate Trump had previously promised during his campaign.
Trump believes that the United States holds leverage over other nations, including China, due to its status as the world’s largest and wealthiest consumer market.
“Foreign nations will finally be asked to pay for the privilege of access to our market, the biggest market in the world,” Trump said during his Rose Garden speech.
China quickly hit back, announcing that, starting April 10, it would impose 34 percent tariffs on imports of all U.S. goods. This move was part of a broader set of retaliatory actions, including tightening export controls on various rare earth elements and adding U.S. companies to the government’s “unreliable entities list.”
Beijing also filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization (WTO), following through on a threat earlier this week.
Trump pushed back at the Chinese regime after announcing its retaliatory response.
Trade Distorting Practices
Despite joining the WTO in 2001, China did not evolve into the fully-fledged market economy that the United States had anticipated.China’s economic growth has accelerated dramatically since the country joined the WTO. However, the Chinese Communist Party’s trade-distorting practices, such as intellectual property theft, massive state subsidies, currency manipulation, wage suppression, and labor rights violations, have led to the closure of many U.S. manufacturers and the loss of millions of U.S. jobs.
There is a bipartisan view in Washington on the need to address China’s market-distorting practices.
Before the November election last year, President Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, defended tariffs against China.
“Previous efforts to build a China policy on changing China have not succeeded,” Sullivan said on Oct. 24.
As a result, he argued, the United States must adopt a new set of strategies based on the current geopolitical and economic realities.
During his first term, Trump imposed tariffs on more than $300 billion worth of Chinese goods in response to various unfair trade practices, including intellectual property theft.
The Biden administration chose to maintain those tariffs and even announced additional tariffs on products such as electric vehicles (EVs), solar panels, medical equipment, lithium-ion batteries, steel, and aluminum.
Both administrations have used tariffs to level the playing field for domestic manufacturers and protect American workers.
However, Trump’s latest move represents an even bolder step in attempting to contain China and hold it accountable for its longstanding trade-distorting practices.
Nick Iacovella, executive vice president for the Coalition for a Prosperous America, an organization that represents domestic producers and workers, said that these tariffs will address the decades of deindustrialization in the United States.
“It is incredibly important that those tariffs actually stay in place,” he told The Epoch Times.
For decades, there has been a disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street, Iacovella added, commenting on the market reaction.
“When automakers moved their jobs to Mexico, their stock prices went up, but car prices didn’t decrease for American consumers,” he said.
Adam Savit, China policy director at America First Policy Institute, argues that China has less leverage, despite Beijing’s retaliatory actions.
“The U.S. has much less exports to China than China exports to the United States. So inherently, they’re at a disadvantage,” he told The Epoch Times.
Bargaining Chip
On April 4, Trump extended the deadline for TikTok to divest from its Beijing-based parent company by 75 days.The president made the announcement in a post on Truth Social, just ahead of the original April 5 deadline.
Trump stated that he would continue working in “good faith” with China. Previously, he suggested that tariffs could be used as a bargaining chip to pressure China into approving the sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations from ByteDance, which several U.S. officials have warned has ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
“You have a situation with TikTok where China will probably say: ‘We’ll approve a deal, but will you do something on the tariffs?’” Trump said on April 3. “We could use tariffs in order to get something in return.”
