Bala Ramasamy and Matthew Yeung
The Trump-initiated U.S.-China trade war restarted on February 4, 2025, when China’s Ministry of Finance announced a 15 percent retaliatory tariff on certain types of coal and LNG and a 10 percent tariff on crude oil, agricultural machinery, large cars, and pickup trucks. This amounts to $20 billion, which is a fraction of the $500 billion worth of Chinese goods that will be taxed by Trump. China has also imposed export restrictions on some rare earth metals, put several more U.S. companies on its blacklist, and has lodged a complaint to the WTO for a violation of trade rules.
Trump’s basis for imposing tariffs is confusing. It ranges from trade imbalances to the unregulated flow of some fentanyl precursor chemicals from China to the U.S. through Mexico, to arm-twisting ByteDance into selling its international wing, TikTok, to an American company. None of these excuses makes total sense.
Surely, controlling the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. is a customs control issue that would be more effectively done on the buyers’ side, and if the U.S. were serious about combating the opioid epidemic, non-tariff measures would be more powerful. If a collaboration between China Customs and its 100,000 staff and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with its 20,000 officers cannot overpower the drug cartels and syndicates, no amount of tariffs will bring the opioid crisis under control.
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