Taipei, Taiwan – When United States President Donald Trump began his first term in 2017, he set about implementing the most hawkish economic policy toward China in decades.
In the first 100 days of his second term, Trump has taken Washington’s confrontation with Beijing to greater heights still, laying out a staunchly protectionist trade agenda that has led to a de facto trade embargo between the world’s two largest economies.
US tariffs on most Chinese goods have risen to 145 percent, with the rate rising to 245 percent on some items, while loopholes that previously allowed Chinese exporters to evade pre-existing tariffs have been closed.
China has imposed tariffs of 125 percent on most US goods in response, in addition to other retaliatory measures such as export controls on critical minerals and tighter limits on the number of Hollywood films shown in Chinese cinemas.
Trump’s trade war picks up from where he left off in his first administration, shaped by a longstanding belief that China and other countries have taken advantage of their trade relationship with the US.
“It’s more or less a continuation in terms of goals and direction, maybe with more force, more determination. He has been treating China as an enemy and not as a friend,” Zhiwu Chen, a finance professor at the University of Hong Kong, told Al Jazeera.
The US trade deficit in goods and services reached $918.4bn in 2024, with the deficit in goods hitting a record $1.2 trillion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
In Trump’s worldview, China, the US’s third-largest trade partner after Mexico and Canada, is among the worst exploiters.
“Trump believes that China has gotten a free ride during the era of globalisation and exploited the US consumer,” Dennis Wilder, a former White House official and senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Initiative for US-China Dialogue on Global Issues, told Al Jazeera.
“He wants to balance trade to create good jobs for Americans, and he will seek Chinese investment in the US to create good blue-collar jobs. He wants US firms to have far more ability to sell in China.”
Trump launched his first trade war with China in 2018 in response to what he claimed were unfair trade practices and intellectual property theft by Chinese firms.
Over the next two years, his administration imposed tariffs on $300bn of Chinese goods, most of which remain in place five years on.
While campaigning for re-election last year, Trump made clear that he would hit China with even steeper tariffs if returned to the White House.
While Trump’s anti-China trade posture since January has come as no surprise, the scope and erratic on-again, off-again nature of his tariffs have taken observers aback, said Jeffrey Moon, who served as the assistant US trade representative for China under former US President Barack Obama.
“Trump was surprised that he was elected in 2016 and was not prepared to take office. In 2025, however, Project 2025 gave him a detailed playbook that included reciprocal tariffs and that he began executing in his inaugural address,” Moon, who heads the consultancy China Moon Strategies, told Al Jazeera, referring to a political roadmap drafted by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative US think tank.
Most of Trump’s original tariffs were kept in place and even expanded on by former US President Joe Biden, but where the Biden administration painted US-China competition as an ideological battle between democracy and authoritarianism, Trump is motivated by a different set of values, Wilder said.
“As has become obvious in the second term, Trump is a geoeconomic, not a geostrategic president,” he said.
“Trump does not seek the demise of President Xi or seek to decouple from the Chinese economy unless China is unwilling to give the US what he considers a fairer deal in economic relations,” Wilder added, referring to Chinese President Xi Jinping.
‘Unsustainable’ tariffs
In recent weeks, Trump and White House officials have openly said they want to negotiate with China and lower the 145 percent tariff rate, which US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has called “unsustainable”.
Trump has said his administration is in active negotiations with Beijing on trade. Chinese officials have insisted that any such talks have yet to begin.
Ray Wang, a Washington, DC-based analyst who focuses on US-China economic statecraft, said Trump’s strategy of maximising pressure on China could backfire and push Beijing towards further “decoupling” from the US economy.
“Facing embargo-level tariffs and intensifying hawkish rhetoric, Beijing is unlikely to engage in meaningful negotiations, thereby complicating efforts to address the very economic concerns the policy aims to resolve,” Wang told Al Jazeera.
Marina Zhang, an associate professor at the Australia-China Relations Institute, University of Technology Sydney, said Chinese manufacturers may increasingly look to other countries to insulate themselves from the US economy.
“For China, this presents both risks and opportunities: while its exporters to the US face immediate pressure, Beijing’s broader push for market diversification – to ASEAN, Africa, and Latin America – gains new urgency and traction,” Zhang told Al Jazeera.
As the US-China trade war lumbers on, Trump has also set his sights on US trade with other countries generally.
Over the past 100 days, Trump has hit Mexico and Canada with separate rounds of on-again, off-again tariffs.
On April 2, he expanded the trade war to more than 180 countries and territories with the announcement of so-called “reciprocal tariffs” of between 10 and 49 percent.
Trump subsequently paused the tariffs for 90 days in anticipation of country-by-country negotiations, but he has continued to push China’s trading partners to close loopholes for US-bound exports.
“The difference [from his first term] is that Trump’s China strategy is part of a worldwide economic strategy. For example, as he cuts new trade deals with Japan, South Korea, Singapore, etc, he will want to make sure that they are not helping China sidestep fairness in US-China trade,” said Wilder, the former White House official.
Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said Trump’s end goal is to rewrite the longstanding “Washington consensus” supporting free trade and market liberalisation to one shaped in his image.
“The Trump administration is changing the nature of its economic and security partnerships and essentially its relationship with the entire world. That’s not directed specifically at China,” Thompson told Al Jazeera.
“This is really about Trump’s perception that the US has been taken advantage of and hasn’t benefitted from globalisation, and, frankly, reflecting the American voters’ perception of the same thing.”