Beijing has slammed Donald Trump’s plan to impose additional 100 per cent tariffs on Chinese exports and threatened new countermeasures as it blamed the US for escalating tensions between the two powers.
The commerce ministry accused the US of imposing new restrictions on China, including putting groups on a trade blacklist, since Chinese and US officials held talks in Madrid last month as part of a truce in the trade war.
“China’s position on tariff wars has been consistent: we do not want to fight, but we are not afraid to fight,” the ministry said on Sunday.
The commerce ministry added that the US side had for a long time “abused export controls” and overstretched the concept of national security.
On Friday, the US president warned that he would also impose “large scale” export controls on “virtually every product they make” including “all critical software”, saying they would be imposed on November 1. The move came after China introduced sweeping export controls on rare earths.
China on Sunday said it would take “corresponding measures to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests” if Trump followed through on the threat.
Later on Sunday, Trump appeared to take a more conciliatory tone. “Don’t worry about China, it will all be fine! Highly respected President Xi just had a bad moment,” he wrote on Truth Social. “He doesn’t want Depression for his country, and neither do I. The U.S.A. wants to help China, not hurt it!!!”
The series of exchanges between the US and China sparked speculation about whether both sides were preparing to compromise or double down.
Christopher Johnson, a former top CIA China analyst who heads the China Strategies Group consultancy, said Xi may have imposed the rare earth controls to provoke Trump into overreacting.
“Xi saw what happened in April when Trump rapidly escalated and Xi forced him into an embarrassing climbdown by punching back hard,” said Johnson.
“In this case, Xi may gain a similar boost in global perceptions of China’s standing in the showdown whilst also pocketing a successful strategic gambit with limited consequences.”
China’s actions this week appeared intended to exert leverage ahead of an expected face-to-face meeting between Trump and Xi at the end of October in South Korea. Trump on Friday cast doubt on whether the meeting would go ahead but later said they would probably meet.
Beijing said on Sunday that the impact on supply chains would be “extremely limited” and insisted companies “need not worry”, saying any applications for civilian use that comply with regulations would be approved. Some experts interpreted that as a sign that China may have concluded that it over-reached with the original move.
A détente has largely been in place in the US-China trade war since a truce reached in Geneva in May. Before that, the two countries were locked in a virtual trade embargo after Trump hit Beijing with 145 per cent tariffs and Xi retaliated with 125 per cent levies on goods coming from the US.
Feng Chucheng, a Beijing-based founding partner at Hutong Research, an independent advisory, said that following the Madrid talks, both sides had seemed keen to avoid escalation ahead of the proposed Xi-Trump meeting.
However, that changed after the US decision in September to tighten export controls on Chinese companies to make it harder to circumvent rules designed to slow China’s ability to develop advanced semiconductors.
Beijing has also opposed Washington’s decision to increase fees for China-built vessels visiting US ports.
“From Xi’s perspective, these actions are not only substantive escalations but further confirmation of low credibility of the Trump administration,” Feng said.
He added that Beijing was reactivating a playbook used after Trump’s initial tariffs in April, “escalating first to force a negotiation reset, rather than waiting passively for the next talks”.
Wang Dong, executive director of the Institute for Global Cooperation and Understanding at Peking University, said Trump’s “surprise” at being hit with the new controls reflected the previous US mentality that it could impose tariffs on China with impunity.
“At the minimum, there is a deep-rooted sense of arrogance and self-righteousness on the US side,” Wang said. He said China was turning the tables and creating a more level field for “great power bargaining”.
Wang Yiwei, an international relations scholar at Renmin University in Beijing, said China’s trade with the US was diminishing in favour of countries in the global south and those participating in the Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure scheme.
China’s retaliatory measures were aimed at telling the US to return “to stable trade relations and not play a game any more”, he said.
The White House, US Trade Representative and Treasury did not respond to requests for comment.
Yanmei Xie, a senior associate fellow with the Mercator Institute for China Studies, said while the US had leverage on trade, and both countries were exposed to the other’s export controls, China might have the “upper hand” when it came to the corporate sector.
“There are way more American companies producing in China than the other way around, and some of them, like Apple and Tesla, are the crown jewel of corporate America,” she said.
Additional contributions by Wang Xueqiao in Shanghai
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