The Official "Damned Trump" Thread: Phase II

[Angrboda]

China is America’s second-largest source of imports, after Mexico, and third-largest export market, after Canada and Mexico.

But while President Trump’s tariffs exempted some large categories of imports, like semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, the Chinese tariffs have no exemptions.

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China’s ambitious “Made in China 2025” industrial policy, which began in 2015, has made the country largely self-reliant in the production of many industrial goods, from electric cars to solar panels. While Chinese officials were caught off guard by Mr. Trump’s trade actions in 2018 and 2019 and sometimes took a few days to respond, they have moved much faster this year.

They acted on Friday, 36 hours after his latest tariffs, even though it was a national holiday.

But the Chinese economy depends heavily on exports, which is why Mr. Trump’s tariffs have caused alarm in Beijing and across the country. China’s trade surplus last year in manufactured goods — the amount by which exports exceeded imports — was equal to a tenth of the entire economy and rising.

Chinese officials said this week that if tariffs restrict their access to the American market, they will shift exports to other markets. But China already runs large and widening surpluses with most of Europe and the developing world, triggering a wave of tariffs by countries elsewhere on Chinese goods.

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China imposed a two-month freeze on shipments of rare earths to Japan in 2010 during a territorial dispute.

The Obama administration responded by calling for the United States to restart its own mining and processing of rare earths, which mostly shut down in the 1990s. But 15 years after the Japan embargo, mining has resumed in the United States but most of the ore is shipped to China for processing into valuable materials, as rare earths refining has proved technically challenging.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/busin...ation.html