China came to Trump’s trade war ready to fight.
The United States and China are locked in an economic war. They’ve levied tit-for-tat tariffs on each other, and there’s little sign of detente.
President Donald Trump said in a statement Tuesday that “The ball is in China’s court. China needs to make a deal with us. We don’t have to make a deal with them.”
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for China’s commerce ministry said at the start of the week that the US needs to “take a big step to correct its mistakes, completely cancel the wrong practice of ‘reciprocal tariffs’ and return to the right path of mutual respect.”
My colleague Miles Bryan recently produced an episode of Today, Explained that’s all about China’s response to Trump’s tariffs, so I asked him about the stalemate we’re seeing, and what all this means for China. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
So Miles, we’re in a trade war with China right now, right? What’s going on?
Well, it’s been changing nearly every day. So it might change by the time this publishes, but things really took a turn on April 2, when President Trump announced his “Liberation Day” 10 percent baseline tariffs on every country, with higher so-called reciprocal tariffs on many countries on top of that.
That led to days of chaos, stock market swings, bond market problems, and to President Trump deciding to pause those reciprocal tariffs.
However, he left big tariffs on China. As of us talking on Tuesday, they’re at 145 percent for most items, which is just a massive, a massive blow to trade between the United States and China.
In the last couple of days, the administration’s walked the scope of its tariffs on China back a bit, putting a pause on a lot of consumer electronics — think things like the iPhone — though Trump says tariffs on those goods are coming back down the line.
China’s taken some counter measures. Tuesday, it announced it was halting delivery of some orders it had with Boeing, the jet company. It’s halted some rare earth mineral exports to the United States. And it has a pretty broad 125 percent tariff on most US goods.
So what we’re left with is a trade war against the world that’s kind of in suspended animation, but a trade war against China that’s very real.
Got it. Now, a lot of countries are — at least according to Trump — trying to negotiate on tariffs, but China, if anything, seems to be taking an aggressive, even antagonistic stance. Why is that?
China is not backing down.
And they are kind of needling the administration. State media, Chinese social media users, and the Chinese Embassy in the United States have been putting out all these reports and funny cultural memes, things like videos of Mao Zedong, you know, sounding belligerent in the early ’50s, when the Chinese were fighting the United States in the Korean War; pieces on how dependent Trump is on China for his merchandise; and even strange AI-generated videos showing fat Americans, stitching together Nikes in an American factory looking sad.
