Trump is set on imposing additional 10% tariff on Chinese goods from Tuesday, but China is not keeping quite. According to China’s state-controlled Global Times, the country is getting ready to bring in counter measures against the freshly announced US tariffs which will raise an all-out trade war between the world’s top two economies, reported Reuters.
According to the report, China is planning to target American agricultural exports. It said that the country may include both tariffs and “a series of non-tariff measures, and US agricultural and food products will most likely be listed.”
The Global Times, quoting an anonymous source, reported that China is looking into and planning responses to Trump’s threat of adding a 10% tariff on Chinese goods. It said that the Chinese government will bring in these measures on US’ agricultural and food products.
US President Donald Trump had announced an additional 10% duty on China, which took their total tariff up 20%. Trump had accused Beijing of falling short on effort to stop the influx of fentanyl in United States of America. China’s commerce ministry had responded by saying that this is “blackmail”.
Reuters report suggests that China is the biggest market for the agricultural products in the US, and that this sector has been utilised as sort of a punching bag in times of trade tensions.
Genevieve Donnellon-May, a researcher at the Oxford Global Society told Reuters that inspite of there being a decline in imports since 2018, any tariff on products like soybean, grains etc. is likely to have a major impact on the US-China trade and even on the exporters and farmers of America.
(With Reuters Inputs)