With the new tariffs announced on Wednesday in Washington, President Trump has now imposed additional tariffs on Chinese goods of 54 percent — an extremely heavy burden that will cause companies to look elsewhere for suppliers.
Mr. Trump added a 34 percent tariff on imports from China, to take effect on April 9, on top of two earlier rounds of 10 percent tariffs he had already imposed.
Those are just the new tariffs on China since Mr. Trump started his second term in office. During his first term, he put tariffs of 25 percent on a wide range of Chinese industrial goods and 7.5 percent on some consumer goods, which former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. left in place.
Mr. Trump’s latest action, on what he described as “Liberation Day,” has provoked considerable anger in China. On Thursday, China’s commerce ministry vowed to take countermeasures to “safeguard its own rights and interests.”
Many government officials and experts had been hoping that Mr. Trump might follow the World Trade Organization’s free trade rules.
He Weiwen, a retired Ministry of Commerce official who is now a senior fellow at the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing research group, said that Mr. Trump’s actions were the biggest violation ever of the rules of the W.T.O. or its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.
The latest tariffs “will not liberate America, but will only cause new suffering to the American economy and American families,” Mr. He said.
China’s official news agency, Xinhua, published an editorial describing the Trump administration’s tariffs as “self-defeating bullying,” and said Washington was “turning trade into an over-simplistic tit-for-tat game.”
