The ongoing trade war between the US and China has escalated after American President Donald Trump’s administration’s new 10 per cent tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods kicked in on Monday, spanning thousands of products, including food seasonings, baseball gloves, network routers and industrial machinery parts.
China retaliated immediately with new taxes of 5 to 10 per cent on $60 billion of US goods such as meat, chemicals, clothes and auto parts, reports CNN.
Trump’s latest tariffs on China now apply to over $250 billion of Chinese goods, roughly half the amount the country sells to the US. The latest round affects thousands of products bought by US consumers, including hundreds of millions of dollars of furniture and electronics imports.
The US tariffs imposed earlier in the year mostly hit industrial goods.
The measures are meant to punish China for what the Trump administration says are unfair trade practices, such as intellectual property theft.
Beijing has rejected the US assertions, accusing Washington of protectionism and bullying. It has fired back with tariffs on American goods worth more than $110 billion.
Monday’s tariffs are set to increase at the end of the year from 10 to 25 per cent, CNN said.
Trump has also threatened tariffs on another $267 billion of Chinese products which would mean the US measures effectively cover all Beijing’s annual goods exports to Washington (the total for 2017 was about $506 billion).
Trump’s decision to move ahead rapidly with the latest tariffs appears to have put the brakes on plans for a new round of negotiations between the two sides.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had invited Chinese negotiators to Washington to resume talks, but a senior White House official said on Friday that no new meetings are planned for the time being.