President Donald Trump on April 7 threatened to impose an additional 50 percent tariff on China if Beijing does not withdraw its retaliatory measures on U.S. goods.
In an April 7 Truth Social post, Trump said the Chinese communist regime has until April 8 to reverse its decision. If it fails to do so, the new tariffs will be implemented on April 9.
The warning follows China’s announcement last week of 34 percent retaliatory tariffs and other trade restrictions in response to the administration’s April 2 rollout of reciprocal duties.
Trump condemned China’s response, writing that Beijing’s latest tariffs come “on top of their already record setting Tariffs, Non-Monetary Tariffs, Illegal Subsidization of companies, and massive long term Currency Manipulation.”
He reiterated his previous warning that any country retaliating against the United States would face “new and substantially higher Tariffs, over and above those initially set.”
The president also made clear that all trade negotiations with China would be terminated if Beijing failed to rescind its new tariffs.
At an April 7 press conference, Trump said that the United States has “one shot” to correct trade imbalances with China that have built up for decades. He said that no future president is likely to take similar action.
“I'll tell you what, it’s an honor to do it because we have been just … just destroyed, what they’ve done to our system,” Trump said at the Oval Office, adding that America’s debt of more than $36 trillion was caused in part by prior administrations that allowed unfavorable trade imbalances to continue.
Trump has long argued that other countries have taken advantage of the United States through unfair trade practices and that a new tariff arrangement is essential to restoring balance. Administration officials have said that last year’s $1.2 trillion trade deficit highlights the need for sweeping changes, with tariffs playing a central role.
On April 2, Trump declared an economic emergency and announced a 10 percent baseline tariff on nearly all imports. Steeper duties, amounting to roughly 50 percent of the tariffs and other trade barriers enacted on the United States by each respective country, were unveiled for roughly 60 nations identified by the administration as the “worst offenders” in trade imbalances with the United States—with China topping that list. Other countries subjected to the higher tariffs include Vietnam (26 percent), Japan (24 percent), and Europe (20 percent).
The administration’s 34 percent reciprocal tariffs on China—targeting currency manipulation, industrial subsidies, and other trade practices—are being added to existing 20 percent duties already applied to Chinese imports. Together, they bring the total tariff rate to 54 percent, affecting nearly $600 billion in annual trade.
In response, Beijing launched a series of countermeasures, including tighter export controls on several categories of rare earth minerals and the addition of more U.S. firms to its “Unreliable Entity List.” The blacklist targets foreign businesses that the Chinese regime deems a threat to its national security and economic development.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a weekend statement saying Beijing is prepared to “open its doors wider” to global trading partners—signaling interest in a possible pivot away from U.S.-focused trade relationships.
However, Trump has dismissed China’s ability to mount an effective counteroffensive, claiming that the country is already reeling from earlier tariff effects. He credited his administration’s trade agenda with generating trillions of dollars in new investment and strong job growth in the United States.
“China has been hit much harder than the USA, not even close,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “They, and many other nations, have treated us unsustainably badly.”
During the April 2 announcement of the reciprocal tariffs, Trump held up a chart listing countries and territories that had put up trade barriers to the United States.
“If you look at that ... China, first row, 67 percent. That’s tariffs charged to the USA, including currency manipulation and trade barriers,” Trump explained. “We are going to be charging [them] a discounted reciprocal tariff of 34 percent. ... We charge them less. So how can anybody be upset?”
While the exact basis for the 67 percent figure is unclear, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said in a note on its reciprocal tariff calculations that assessing all of the various tariff, regulatory, tax, and other policies is very difficult but that their “combined effects can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.”
By estimating what tariff rate would eliminate the trade deficit—which in 2024 amounted to $295.4 billion with China—the Trump administration argues that it can approximate the cumulative effect of China’s various trade barriers against the United States and apply reciprocal rates that begin to level the playing field.
The sweeping tariffs have rattled markets, with U.S. stocks extending their selloff in a volatile April 7 trading session. Trump and his advisers have described the economic turbulence as a necessary but temporary phase in what the president has dubbed an “economic revolution.”
“We will win,“ Trump wrote in a post on social media. ”Hang tough, it won’t be easy, but the end result will be historic.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent echoed those sentiments, saying that a key goal of the tariffs is to reduce the federal deficit and create fiscal space for tax relief, particularly for lower-income Americans.
In an April 4 interview with Tucker Carlson, Bessent said the administration has already collected several hundred million dollars from the newly implemented China tariffs, in addition to the $35 billion generated annually thanks to the tariffs that Trump imposed on China during his first term. Bessent projected that revenue from the broader tariff package could eventually reach between $300 billion and $600 billion per year.
That money, Bessent said, would be directed toward four policy priorities aimed at working-class Americans: eliminating taxes on tips, Social Security benefits, and overtime pay and making interest payments on U.S.-made auto loans tax-deductible.
“Think [about] what the president is doing here,” Bessent said. “He is backing into an affordability solution for the bottom 50 percent of wage earners because they’re the ones who will benefit from all four of those programs.”
While some countries—like China—have responded to Trump’s tariffs with countermeasures, others have opened the door to negotiations in search of a resolution.
Some analysts warn that hopes for swift rollbacks of tariffs or trade deals may be premature.
“There will likely be some rally attempts on hopes for tariff rollbacks and/or negotiations with trade partners,” John Belton, a portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds, said in a note to The Epoch Times.
“Unfortunately, we are of the view that the bigger picture is very clear: Tariffs are here to stay and will be much higher than they’ve been in decades. The market has to learn how to deal with this new reality.”
