China now faces 245% Trump tariff
China faces 245% Trump tariff
Just when you think the idiocy couldn't get worse.
Good luck America! It's not a dust bowl this time. It's an orange turd that's gonna ruin you.
Give him a few days, he'll either pause the tariffs or declare an exemption for 99% of the goods they sell us. And has the US government or port authorities actually collected any of Pig Boy's brainfart tariffs yet?
Let's just call it what it is: An embargo. It's been an embargo for the last 200%.
I mean at some point the number doesn't matter anymore as most trade will just stop.
Which is exactly what China said when they stopped at 125% and said they're done playing stupid chicken and we can knock ourselves out raising them to eleventy bazillion percent.
The Chinese government has their own sins, behaving like petulant children isn't one of them.
Make no mistake that China does act like a petulant child. Just not about this issue
China already said they wouldn't raise tariffs anymore since they're so high already it wouldn't matter. That means the next step might be dumping US bonds now, which is a nuclear option.
In response to that, Trump, who is incapable of thinking of anything else just does this moronic tariff raise.
I’m an Australian who’s terrified of Trump giving us an “them or us” ultimatum.
I’m starting to think it’s likely, and soon.
We have magnitudes more trade with China than the USA. We are one of the few countries that buy more USA stuff than we sell to them. The only reason to stick with the USA would be if we trust them for defence reasons. What’s happening in Ukraine means we can’t. So it would likely be an own goal for Trump as we’d have to choose China over USA. The libs would go nuts, due to racism. We’d be objectively worse off, as an unreliable defence partner is still a partner, but if we ditched trade with China, our economy would collapse overnight.
America desperately needs us as a base in the South Pacific.
America also desperately needs us to not side with China in terms of Iron and Coal should an actual war happen.
Trump’s willingness to abandon their allies in the face of foreign aggression means we should seriously think before siding with the US.
For what it’s worth: choose the 3rd path; pick the EU and/or the commonwealth countries
Giving in to bullies just leads to more bullying.
At least you will finally be free from the US yoke.
Doesn’t seem to be a difficult choice. The US is preying on its closest allies, threatening to annex Canada, and Greenland. China is not.
Taiwan would like a word.
It's not "China faces 245% tariff."
It is, "America faces 245% tax increase."
Tariffs aren't paid by China. They are a tax on Americans.
This week, China imposed more export controls on rare earths, which include materials used in high-tech products, aerospace manufacturing, and the defense sector.
And then Trump,
executive order signed by President Donald Trump that launched an investigation into the "national security risks posed by U.S. reliance on imported processed critical minerals and their derivative products."
"There is no winner in tariff wars and trade wars, and China does not want to fight, but it is by no means afraid to fight."
They are also selling things direct to consumer on Tiktok, and it's hilarious. They can't name prices or brands... But you can communicate via their WhatsApp they list and buy almost any luxury bag for $100 and Nikes for $10-$15. Laundry pods for a few cents a pod.
They are even giving directions for how to order from manufacturers and avoid tariffs with personal shopping services.
The Foreign Minister of China is tweeting Mao speeches regarding Chinese resistance towards the US, so it's safe to say they likely aren't going to capitulate anytime soon.
It's what happens when someone tells Trump that China shut off supplies used to make USA's consumer economy functional.
OMG was this a recent press conference or something??
Will probably see further movements from the PRC to sell off US treasury bonds and shifting more away from the dollar in general, along with tighter export restrictions on rare Earth. China already said they won’t keep increasing tariffs, but they seem dedicated to not backing down, and they have the Material means to actually resist US trade aggression.
What would be incredibly based is if the PRC starts paying off loans in Africa with its dollars, decoupling the Global South from the US even further. Gets rid of dollars and debt in the Global South, potentially freeing up new customers for goods produced in China and strengthening ties.
American politicians tend to ignore that China has been an empire for two millennia, so the century of humiliation may be an outlier.
What would be incredibly based is if the PRC starts paying off loans in Africa with its dollars, decoupling the Global South from the US even further. Gets rid of dollars and debt in the Global South, potentially freeing up new customers for goods produced in China and strengthening ties.
This is exactly what's going to happen.
China borrows from Africa?
Africa has borrowed from everyone. But mostly from the US and EU in the form of USD, usually in contracts that require them to pay back in USD. With the belt and road initiative china added to Africa's loans with much better terms. China could offer additional loans at pennies on the dollar in exchange for the us Treasury bonds, which Africa could use to pay off its loans to the US and EU.
This would effectively shift dozens of countries away from the dollar permanently, while being the single largest anti colonial action in history, while giving china pretty extensive mineral rights across Africa.
Everyone wins in this scenario long term except the US and EU; and china is only hurt in the short term by underselling their us bonds.
No, it's the other way around of course. The neo-colonized borrow from the neo-colonizer.
Please, please let China retaliate.
Why don't they just ban imports from China? Then China can ban imports from the U.S. Then the trade imbalance "problem" will be solved.
For the us; it would end the US economy overnight. There isn't a product manufactured in the US or service done in the US that does not involve something from china. Even at ridiculously high tariff prices there's simply no alternative infrastructure for replacing those imports. Even the trump regime are slaves to capital given that's the only thing backing the legitimacy of the US.
For china; the only thing imported from the US are luxury/private sector items. It genuinely does not affect the core industries (60% of Chinas gdp is in the public sector) of china, and with China's welfare system, private industries can fail without the employees ever becoming homeless or starving. There simply isn't a reason to go that far and needlessly escalate.
Tl;Dr nothing the US can do economically can realistically hurt china, just small parts of its private sector. China, however could cripple the US since the US allowed its companies to offload so much core industrial work to china. None of the actual adults in the US will allow trump to piss off china to the point of cutting off trade entirely, and china isn't petty.
Yeah, I know it wouldn't be a good thing for the U.S., but they want to destroy everything anyway so they can create their fascist paradise. I'd prefer if they just get it over with already.
If the end is coming, I'd prefer it to get here already.
Master Negotiator at work, folks.
There is a lot of us investment in Chinese industrial manufacturing. Remember that China is a nominally communist country. I imagine that it would require a single signature to nationalize all of it.
Trump's and the Republicans are financial dumbasses and well American who voted for trump and didn't vote because of reasons, well have the day you voted for you bunch of dicks.
I suggest both countries adopt a tariff strategy of other country +10%.
Seems like this is just setting up the potential for someone in Australia to act as a middleman for Chinese products to the US and make a healthy profit while doing so.
This is not how this work. You need to actually had value in the country, you can't just act as a middle man.
Is there anyone brave enough to debate where they are for these tariffs against me?
The thing is, there are individual aspects of the tariff situation that could, theoretically, be defended, but the sum collective cannot because each aspect undercuts the others.
The simplest way to see this is to examine the three contradictory explanations that the administration has offered for why the tariffs are being applied:
Suppose 1 is true. If the goal of the tariffs is to return manufacturing to the US, they have to be permanent, or at least very long term. No company is going to spend 4 years building a factory just to avoid a tariff that won't be around in 4 years time. But if the tariffs are permanent, then they cannot be used as a bargaining tool, because the bargaining process has to conclude with the tariffs being removed or substantially reduced in order to win concessions from the other side. And if the tariffs are supposed to move manufacturing back to the US and address the trade imbalance, they cannot serve as a long-term source of revenue, because eventually (the theory goes) those companies will produce everything in the US, meaning they won't be paying tariffs.
Now suppose 2 is true. If the goal of the tariffs is to be a bargaining tool then the bargaining has to end with the tariffs being removed or substantially reduced. In this scenario, the tariffs will not result in repatriating manufacturing, and they will not serve as a source of long-term income for the reasons we just discussed.
And of course, if 3 is true, the same problems apply. If the tariffs are to be a source of long-term income then the current trade imbalances have to remain. If manufacturing repatriates, the income dries up. If deals are struck in return for removing the tariffs, the income dries up.
Tariffs can, when applied thoughtfully and with care, serve as a tool to help achieve any one of those three goals. They cannot solve any of those problems on their own;
And they certainly cannot solve all three of them together.
Bernie Sanders has long been an advocate against unrestricted free trade. There are many progressive economists who favour the careful use of tariffs as a way of preventing corporations from exploiting cheap international labour for profit while driving down domestic wages. Cory Doctorow has an excellent essay on this subject; https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/
There's also Bessent's plan to repatriate manufacturing by strong-arming the rest of the world into accepting deals where they peg their currency to the US dollar, thus allowing the US to devalue the dollar while maintaining it's privileged position as the global reserve currency, which would in turn tend to shift the US trade balance more towards exports. But Bessent himself isn't really a fan of using tariffs to achieve this, and any sane person would plan to go after a few countries at a time, not the whole planet. It's also a bad plan anyway because once people see that you're planning to devalue the currency you just pegged them to, they'll probably just tear up those deals, because if you weren't acting in good faith why should they? Also, devaluing the dollar, on its own, would likely do little to increase domestic manufacturing in the US. It would make existing US exports more attractive, but it wouldn't create any kind of a serious case for investing in more manufacturing in the US. The US standard of living is still much, much higher than most of the places where companies can build these goods, which means its simply more expensive to do anything in the US. That only changes is you massively reduce the US standard of living, which isn't exactly the big win anyone in MAGA wants, now is it?
The point being, yes, there are plenty of arguments for the use of tariffs, just like there are plenty of situations where a reasonable person might want a gun. That doesn't then imply that it's a good idea to shoot yourself in the foot. What Trump and his administration are doing with tariffs cannot be defended, because it simply does not make sense as a plan. It's an incoherent, self-defeating hodge-podge of ideas that could only have resulted from many different warring factions trying to enact their own preferred plan while a mad-king at the centre of it all listens to anyone who salves his ego while having absolutely no comprehension of the realities of what he, or anyone around him, is trying to achieve.