BEIJING (AP) — China’s government said Friday it will retaliate for U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff hike on Chinese goods by immediately imposing penalties of the “same scale” on American goods.
The Commerce Ministry said it also is scrapping deals made with Washington in talks aimed at defusing a sprawling trade dispute.
A ministry statement gave no details of what U.S. goods would be affected, but China announced possible targets in April including soybeans, light aircraft, orange juice, whiskey and beef.
“The Chinese side doesn’t want to fight a trade war, but facing the shortsightedness of the U.S. side, China has to fight back strongly,” the statement said. “We will immediately introduce the same scale and equal taxation measures, and all economic and trade achievements reached by the two sides will be invalidated.”
We will know if the Chinese are serious if they scrap the deals they just made with Ivanka.
This is the part that will need unpacking. For example, I seem to remember recent progress about ownership requirements and intellectual-property transfer for joint ventures in china. There are a bunch of US companies that likely just had a very expensive rug pulled out from under them.
@ronbyers It would certainly be interesting if they yanked the funding for that resort trump is invested in. (And I’m sure they consider their commitments to “reform” ZTE no longer binding…)
Logically speaking, of course starting a trade war will have a 0% success rate in extracting concessions. Question is, at what point does that become obvious even to the right wing base? Sure, they’ve obtained legendary status for seeing what they want to see, and perception lags reality even in communities that are open-minded. But this is so obvious, and such a stark contrast with his promises, that something’s gotta’ give. He promised nothing but home runs on trade, and he’s literally batting .000 so far.
Now that’s what I call WINNING!
I wonder how all those Trump voting soybean farmers and cattle ranchers feel now.