China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs have said they will pay no attention to US President Donald Trump’s “tariff numbers game” after the White House suggested Chinese exports are facing tariffs of up to 245 percent.
The White House disclosed the latest tariff rates in a fact sheet earlier this week. The bulletin includes Trump’s recent 125 percent tariff and earlier 20 percent tariff imposed in response to Beijing’s alleged failure to curb fentanyl exports to the US, as well as potential duties of between 7.5 percent and 100 percent that could be imposed following national security reviews launched under the Trade Act of 1974.
Economists have said that Trump’s tariffs, if not eased, will bring a halt to most trade between the US and China due to the exorbitant rise in costs.
Actually, they are no longer tariffs, but sanctions.
Sure, in some functional sense, Trump announced a set of levies to be collected on imports upon their entry into the country. But a tariff policy would consider whether Americans have the wherewithal to make that good domestically, whether component parts that go into US manufacturing should be targeted at the same rate as finished goods, and whether government policy has incentivized a transition to domestic production to encourage the investment.
Even the Gilded Age era that Trump looks at longingly did not feature across-the-board tariffs; the famed McKinley Tariff of 1890 cut tariffs on sugar, the biggest revenue-raiser of the era.
What Trump is doing is a sanction policy, only he’s doing it against the whole world, all at once, for the assumed harm of “ripping off” the United States for decades.
And sanctions have become a dangerously large component of American geopolitical strategy, an instrument of economic war felt disproportionately by the world’s poorest citizens. The stated reason that Russia and North Korea and other rogue states aren’t on the tariff lists is because sanctions have destroyed their ability to have a trading relationship with the US, Trump is now applying those punitive measures to the rest of the world. It is not at all surprising that Trump sees the appeal in sanctions.
It is no different from a mob boss moving into town and sending his thugs to every business on Main Street, roughing up the proprietors and asking for protection money so they don’t get pushed out of business.
In fact, David Dayen wrote on April 03, 2025 in The American Prospect that Trump believes that the US is indispensable enough that it can intimidate every country on Earth by, well, asking for protection money, which would take many forms: curbing migration, taking in more US farm exports or weapons systems, reducing industrial capacity in China and forcing more consumption, buying long-dated US debt on the cheap, siding with a war strategy against Iran, literally anything the White House wants.
Trump now has a tool by which he can achieve whatever goals he conjures up, or simply have his leg-breakers beat the global economy to a pulp. It’s a mentality fit for someone repeatedly linked to organized crime.
The problem with this “logic” is that America is not indispensable and other countries have just as much ability to retaliate! And China is showing the way!
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