BEIJING: China said it is shocked by US President Donald Trump’s decision to upscale his trade aggression by targeting an additional $200 billion worth of Chinese exports. The latest move, which involves levying 10% duty on a new selection of Chinese goods, follows an earlier decision when he slapped 25% duty on another set of Chinese exports worth $38 billion.
China’s commerce ministry said the new tariff was unacceptable and it would take countermeasures in order to protect its core interests and its people’s basic interests. Countermeasures involve imposing high tariffs on US exports to China which Beijing has imposed on a range of goods. The ministry said it would also double efforts to get the World Trade Organisation to block Washington’s efforts to penalise China for the wrong reasons.
China calls on mutual efforts from the international community to maintain the practice of
free trade and the multilateral trading system, and fight trade bullying, it said.
Trump had earlier said he would upscale the aggression on China if there were any effort to suppress US exports. He complained that China had built up a massive trade deficit for the US through unfair trade practices and he was merely trying to restore the balance.
At the same time, China is not happy about its own strategy of dealing with the US by using countermeasures. The policy of tit-for-tat tariffs will “destroy” trade between the world’s top two economies, China’s assistant minister of commerce, Li Chenggang, told a forum in Beijing.
“The outburst of large-scale mutual levying of tariffs between China and the United States will inevitably destroy Sino-US trade,” Li said, adding that US policy “actually interferes with the process of economic globalization” and “damages the world economic order”.
“It is a chaotic time in international trade,” Li said. He added: “Companies in both countries will suffer losses. There is no winner in a trade war. Cooperation is the only correct choice between China and the United States. It seems that the US is escalating the scale of this trade friction. The negative impact of the trade friction has already appeared.”
