Beijing strikes back, says it will 'ignore' further U.S. tariff hikes

As tensions continue to rise, the PRC issued a new travel advisory for citizens visiting the U.S.

Welcome back to What’s Happening in China, your weekly China brief.

Heaven
Heaven is a place
A place where nothing
Nothing ever happens*

“We are Chinese. We are not afraid of provocations. We don’t back down,” affirmed Mao Ning, spokesperson for the PRC’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on Thursday.

The next day, Beijing announced it was retaliating against Washington’s most recent tariff escalation—now totaling 145%—by raising its levies on U.S. goods to 125% from 84%, among other measures announced earlier, including a reduction in the number of imported U.S. films. Expressing disinterest in continuing the tit-for-tat, the Ministry of Finance further stated that “if the US continues to play the tariff numbers game, China will ignore it.”

Meanwhile, the PRC continues to try to deepen ties with the EU, Southeast Asia, and the Global South, promoting a message aligned with those efforts. According to Xinhua, on Friday, while meeting with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez in Beijing, Xi Jinping said that “there is no winner in a tariff war,” calling “on China and the EU to fulfill their international responsibilities, work together to safeguard economic globalization and the international trading environment, and jointly resist unilateral bullying.”

While in recent years the PRC has unilaterally updated its visa-free travel policies and expanded the list of countries that benefit from it, in contrast, this week, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism issued a new travel advisory to the United States citing a “deterioration of China-U.S. economic and trade relations, as well as the domestic security situation in the United States.”

In heaven we are not.

Let’s jump into it.

— PC

* Talking Heads, “Heaven”

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Through the Lens

Visitors pause for a rest at Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum in Nanjing.

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In Focus

I. “There is no longer a market for U.S. goods imported into China.”

China on Friday retaliated against U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs by raising its levies on U.S. goods to 125% from 84%, the Chinese finance ministry said.

“Even if the U.S. continues to impose higher tariffs, it will no longer make economic sense and will become a joke in the history of world economy,” the ministry said in a statement, according to a CNBC translation.

“With tariff rates at the current level, there is no longer a market for U.S. goods imported into China,” the statement noted, adding that “if the U.S. government continues to increase tariffs on China, Beijing will ignore.”

The Trump administration confirmed to CNBC on Thursday that the U.S. tariff rate on Chinese imports now effectively totals 145%. Trump’s latest executive order boosted reciprocal tariffs on Beijing to 125%, stacked on top of a combined 20% fentanyl-related tariff imposed in February and March.

Read: China strikes back with 125% tariffs on U.S. goods as trade war intensifies (CNBC)

Related:

• Tariffs: Trump pauses tariffs for most countries, hits China harder (CNBC)

• Trump's triple-digit tariff essentially cuts off most trade with China, says economist (CNBC)

• ‘We will have to raise prices’: gloom and resolve in Yiwu, on China’s trade war frontline (The Guardian)

• Xi Jinping vows to boost strategic ties with neighbours as trade war escalates (SCMP)

• What are China's economists publicly advising Beijing on Trump's tariff war (

  Pekingnology
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• Beijing white paper outlines China’s trade stance before retaliatory strike on US (SCMP)

• Full text: China's Position on Some Issues Concerning China-US Economic, Trade Relations (Global Times)

• Chinese tourists, students express concerns about US after China issues travel, study alerts (Global Times)

• Chinese Students on U.S. Campuses Are Ensnared in Political Standoff (WSJ)

II. “Washington would be particularly unwise to go it alone in a complex global competition.”

For Washington, three realities must be central to any serious strategy for long-term competition. First, scale is essential. Second, China’s scale is unlike anything the United States has ever faced, and Beijing’s challenges will not fundamentally change that on any relevant timeline. And third, a new approach to alliances is the only viable way the United States can build sufficient scale of its own. Altogether, this means that Washington needs its allies and partners in ways that it did not in the past. They are not tripwires, distant protectorates, vassals, or markers of status, but providers of capacity needed to achieve great-power scale. For the first time since the end of World War II, the United States’ alliances are not about projecting power, but about preserving it.

Read: Underestimating China: Why America Needs a New Strategy of Allied Scale to Offset Beijing's Enduring Advantages (Foreign Affairs)

Related: What Even Is Trump’s China Strategy? (ChinaFile)

III. “Old friends, old friends, sat on their park bench like bookends”

The term ‘old friend of the Chinese people’ might seem a colloquial, almost sentimental, phrase to appear in official diplomatic language, but in the Chinese context, those words have a very specific meaning. Most often, they refer to high profile foreigners whose actions have helped the Chinese Communist Party in one way or another. The most famous of these is Henry Kissinger, who led the way for American rapprochement with China.

[…]

To discuss this honorific, I’m joined Professor Anne-Marie Brady, a China expert at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, who was among the first to look at China’s old friends as a serious political concept some 20 years ago, and Ryan Ho Kilpatrick, a journalist based in Hong Kong.

Listen: What does it take to be 'an old friend of the Chinese people'? (The Spectator)