China Strikes Back After Trump Imposes 10% Tariff on Goods

Beijing responded swiftly on Tuesday to the tariffs President Trump had promised, announcing a fusillade of countermeasures targeting American companies and imports of critical products.

Mr. Trump’s 10 percent tariff on all Chinese products went into effect at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, the result of an executive order issued over the weekend aimed at pressuring Beijing to crack down on fentanyl shipments into the United States.

The Chinese government came back with a series of retaliatory steps, including additional tariffs on liquefied natural gas, coal, farm machinery and other products from the United States, which will take effect next Monday. It also immediately implemented restrictions on the export of certain critical minerals, many of which are used in the production of high-tech products.

In addition, Chinese market regulators said they had launched an antimonopoly investigation into Google. Google is blocked from China’s internet, but the move may disrupt the company’s dealings with Chinese companies.

Wendy Cutler, a former U.S. trade negotiator, said the various measures were a signal from China of the range of options it has to respond to Mr. Trump’s trade actions. “This menu approach is not surprising,” she said. “Beijing has been building its toolbox for some time.”

The U.S. tariffs, which Mr. Trump said on Monday were an “opening salvo,” come on top of levies that the president imposed during his first term. Many Chinese products already faced a 10 or 25 percent tariff, and the move adds a 10 percent tariff to more than $400 billion of goods that Americans purchase from China each year, particularly impacting computers and electronics, electrical equipment, and clothing.

Mr. Trump had been planning to hit America’s three largest trading partners, Canada, Mexico and China, with tariffs of varying degrees. But after days of frantic negotiations, Mr. Trump agreed to pause the tariffs on Mexico and Canada for 30 days after the Canadian and Mexican governments promised to step up their oversight of fentanyl and the border.

Mr. Trump said on Monday that he planned to speak with Chinese leader Xi Jinping by phone. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Tuesday that the call was being scheduled and would happen very soon.

China’s counterpunches suggested an effort to hurt American businesses and send a warning to the Trump administration, while holding in reserve measures that could do even more serious damage to trade between the world’s two biggest economies. But some trade experts said China had reserved the right to grant exemptions to its tariffs, and were calibrated to send the Trump administration a message without causing too much damage.

Researchers at Capital Economics calculated that the Chinese tariffs would hit about $20 billion of U.S. exports — about 12 percent of what the United States sends to China each year — far less than the more than $450 billion worth of Chinese imports taxed by the United States. They also said it was notable that no strategic items China imports from the United States — like high-end chips, pharmaceuticals or aerospace equipment — were targeted.

“As far as I can see so far, it’s a relatively limited response, affecting no more than 30 percent of U.S. exports to China,” said Bert Hofman, a former World Bank official and now an adjunct professor at the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore. “They’re probably trying to keep their powder dry, because this could still be only the first step from the Trump administration.”

The Trump administration’s tariffs “seriously undermine the rules-based multilateral training system, damage the foundation of economic and trade cooperation between China and the United States, and disrupt the stability of global industry supply chains,” China’s Ministry of Commerce said in a statement.

The commerce ministry and China’s customs agency announced new restrictions on exports of tungsten, tellurium, molybdenum and other metals important for industry and new technologies, citing “national security and interests.”

Stephen Orlins, the president of the National Committee on United States–China Relations, said that the Chinese response was “measured,” but that the decision to extend curbs on critical minerals was “unwise.”

“It reminds Americans that the supply chain is not reliable,” he said.

China’s measures included an additional 10 percent tariff on crude oil, agricultural equipment, larger cars and pickup trucks, as well as an additional 15 percent tariff on coal and natural gas, the Chinese tax authorities announced. Those tariffs will go into effect Feb. 10.

China also said it had added two American companies to its “unreliable entities” list. One of the companies, PVH — the American retailer that owns the Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger brands — had already been placed under investigation by Chinese regulators in September. China said PVH had taken “discriminatory measures” against goods from the Xinjiang region in China’s far west.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the announcement of the antitrust investigation.

While Google dominates the world in digital advertising and internet search, restrictions in China mean it cannot operate its search engine, its YouTube video platform or its app store, Google Play, in the country. Still, its operating system, Android, is used by some Chinese phone makers, including Xiaomi, Lenovo and Vivo. Regulators around the world, including ones in the United States, Canada, Europe and South Korea, have probed Google on antitrust grounds or brought related cases.

Christine McDaniel, a research fellow with the Mercatus Center, said a 10 percent tariff was not huge, and could likely be absorbed by importers and exporters without extreme pain. U.S. agriculture is vulnerable to retaliation though, she said, and the tariffs “put everyone on notice” that they could escalate.

Besides imposing his new tariffs, Mr. Trump’s executive order, signed on Saturday, ended a popular workaround that many Chinese companies had used to send goods to the United States without paying the tariffs that the president imposed in 2018. The provision, known as de minimis, allowed popular e-commerce companies like Shein and Temu to send billions of dollars of products from Chinese factories directly to American consumers without tariffs.

The deals that Mr. Trump made with Canada and Mexico on Monday brought the United States back from the brink of a potentially devastating trade war with two of its closest allies. But it did not preclude the threat of similar conflicts happening later.

On Monday, Mr. Trump made clear that he would deploy tariffs liberally to get other governments to give him what he wants.

Mr. Trump has accused China of failing to do enough to stop the export of fentanyl and the chemicals that are used to make it. In the executive order he issued on Saturday, Mr. Trump said that shipments of synthetic opioids had ravaged U.S. communities, put a severe strain on the health care system and were the leading cause of death for people aged 18 to 45 in the United States.

It’s not clear what steps the Chinese government has recently taken, if any, to restrict the fentanyl trade, beyond its previous law enforcement collaboration with the United States. Mr. Trump discussed fentanyl with Mr. Xi in a phone call during his first week in office.

During Mr. Trump’s first term, China introduced a ban on fentanyl and began working with the United States to catch traffickers, under pressure from Mr. Trump. And in 2023, Mr. Xi and then-President Joseph R. Biden Jr. agreed to a series of bilateral talks on narcotics after they met in Woodside, Calif.

A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington had said that China firmly opposed tariffs and that any differences or frictions should be resolved through dialogue. “There is no winner in a trade war or tariff war, which serves the interests of neither side nor the world,” the spokesman said.

Mr. Trump waged an intense trade war with China during his first term, after initiating a trade case that found that the country had unfairly infringed on U.S. intellectual property. He ratcheted up tariffs on China and ultimately applied tariffs to about 60 percent of the country’s exports to the United States.

Now Mr. Trump, in office for two weeks, has initiated a new exchange with China.

“This is likely only the beginning of a long process for the two countries to negotiate,” Zhiwei Zhang, the president and chief economist of Pinpoint Asset Management, an investment firm in Hong Kong, said in written comments. “There is hope to de-escalate in this process, though the road ahead may be bumpy.”

Claire Fu contributed reporting from Seoul, Amy Chang Chien from Taipei, Taiwan, and Nico Grant from San Francisco.