Donald Trump has said he will impose additional tariffs of 100 per cent on China and threatened to cancel his summit with President Xi Jinping, reigniting trade tensions between the world’s largest economies.
The US president accused Beijing on Friday of taking an “extraordinarily aggressive position on trade”, and said he would impose “large scale Export Controls on virtually every product they make” as well as on “all critical software”.
The new measures would be imposed from November 1 “or sooner”, depending on China’s actions, he added in a post on Truth Social.
China this week unveiled a package of export controls that would disrupt global supplies of rare earths and critical minerals. Under the new rules, foreign companies would have to obtain Beijing’s permission to export critical magnets and other products that contain even small amounts of rare earths sourced from China.
In response, Trump suggested he would cancel a meeting with Xi that was expected to take place on the margins of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in South Korea at the end of October. International companies had considered the planned meeting as a step towards stabilising US-China relations.
“This was a real surprise, not only to me, but to all the Leaders of the Free World,” Trump wrote on Truth Social about the new Chinese policy. “I was to meet President Xi in two weeks . . . but now there seems to be no reason to do so.”
China’s foreign ministry and state media, sometimes used as an official mouthpiece, had not commented on Trump’s actions by late afternoon in Beijing on Saturday.
Cory Combs, associate director of consultancy Trivium China, said Beijing might not have expected Trump’s response to be “this blunt and severe”, including the US president’s threat to walk away from a meeting with Xi.
“If they had, I can’t imagine they would’ve gone with this as a strategy,” Combs said on Saturday.
He added that while China could deploy more “tit-for-tat” measures — as it has throughout this year, targeting US supply chain vulnerabilities — Beijing might now be looking to adjust this approach.
“The game has changed,” Combs said.
But Wang Wen, dean of the Chongyang Finance Research Institute at Renmin University of China in Beijing, said: “Trump does not have the capability to completely block Chinese imports”.
He said Chinese goods would still enter the US via re-exports no matter what Trump did because “a large number of ‘Made in China’ goods are irreplaceable”.
Wang added that Beijing’s rare earth measures were a response to US charges on Chinese vessels. “If the United States chooses to engage in conflict, China will stand firm and continue the fight.”
Trump said the US had also been contacted by “other Countries who are extremely angry at this great Trade hostility, which came out of nowhere”.
Later on Friday, Trump suggested the meeting with Xi might go ahead. “I’m going to be there regardless, so I assume we might have it,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.
“We’re going to have to see what happens, that’s why I made it November 1. We’ll see what happens.” He added that the US could impose export controls on goods such as “airplane parts”.
“We were just surprised at China. I have a very good relationship with President Xi, and they did that,” Trump said. “This is not something that I instigated.”
The S&P 500 closed 2.7 per cent lower for its biggest one-day drop since early April following Trump’s threat. The Nasdaq Composite tumbled 3.6 per cent. The yield on the two-year US Treasury sank to its lowest level in three weeks, while the dollar fell 0.7 per cent against a basket of currencies.
Beijing’s announcement of export controls this week amounts to a Chinese version of the extraterritorial “foreign direct product rule” that Washington has used to require companies from third countries to obtain licenses to export chips with US content to China.
The move was widely viewed as an effort to create leverage before the two leaders held their first meeting since Trump returned to office.
“Nobody has ever seen anything like this but, essentially, it would ‘clog’ the Markets, and make life difficult for virtually every Country in the World, especially for China,” Trump said in his post.
Trump’s new levies on China raises the prospect of the two countries returning to the full-blown trade war that erupted this year when he hit Beijing with 145 per cent tariffs and Xi retaliated by slapping 125 per cent levies on goods coming from the US.
The average US tariff on imports from China is near 58 per cent, according to analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics. China’s average tariff on US goods is about 37 per cent.
The economic tensions have had a dramatic impact on trade flows, which US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent warned amounted to a de facto trade embargo.
US and Chinese negotiators reached a truce in the trade war in a meeting in Geneva. But the ceasefire came under threat after China started slowing the export of rare earths, which are critical to industries ranging from the auto sector to defence.
The two sides resolved the initial rare earth issue in London in June and have since held trade talks in Stockholm and Madrid that paved the way for Trump to meet Xi. The current 90-day ceasefire that holds tariffs at current levels is set to expire in mid-November.
Some experts have warned that China has leverage over the US because of its dominance in rare earths. However, others have suggested the US has more options that it could deploy, such as requiring chipmakers to obtain a licence to sell any semiconductors to China.
Trump said the new Chinese measures were surprising because the US-China relationship had been “very good” over the past six months, but he claimed Beijing had been “lying in wait” to attack.
“There is no way that China should be allowed to hold the World ‘captive’, but that seems to have been their plan for quite some time, starting with the ‘Magnets’ and, other Elements that they have quietly amassed into somewhat of a Monopoly position, a rather sinister and hostile move, to say the least,” he said.
Additional reporting by Peter Wells and Kate Duguid in New York and Emily Herbert in London
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