China’s Ministry of Commerce announced on Tuesday it was implementing counter-tariffs against the US on multiple products while announcing other trade-related measures, including an investigation into Google.
The government said that it would implement a 15% tariff on coal and liquified natural gas products, as well as a 10% tariff on crude oil, agricultural machinery and large-displacement cars.
“It is not only unhelpful in solving its own problems but also damages normal economic and trade co-operation between China and the US.”
The 10% tariff that President Donald Trump ordered on China was set to go into effect on Tuesday, though Mr Trump planned to talk with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the next few days.
This isn’t the first round of tit-for-tat actions between the two countries. China and the US engaged in a trade war in 2018 when Mr Trump raised tariffs on Chinese goods and China responded in kind.
This time, analysts said, China is much better prepared to counter, with the government announcing a slew of measures that cut across different sectors of the economy, from energy to individual US companies.
The impact on US exports may be limited. Though the US is the biggest exporter of liquid natural gas globally, it does not export much to China.
In 2023, the US exported 173,247 million cubic feet of LNG to China, representing about 2.3% of total natural gas exports, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
The country also announced export controls on several elements critical to the production of modern high-tech products.
They include tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, molybdenum and indium, many of which are designated as critical minerals by the US Geological Survey, meaning they are essential to US economic or national security and have supply chains vulnerable to disruption.
The export controls are in addition to the ones China placed in December on key elements such as gallium.
“They have a much more developed export control regime,” Philip Luck, an economist at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies and former State Department official, said.
“We depend on them for a lot of critical minerals: gallium, germanium, graphite, a host of others,” he said. “So … they could put some significant harm on our economy.”
While the announcement did not specifically mention any tariffs, the announcement came just minutes after Mr Trump’s 10% tariffs were to take effect.
It is unclear how the investigation will affect Google’s operations.
Google has a limited presence in China, and its search engine is blocked in the country like most other Western platforms.
It exited the Chinese market in 2010 after refusing to comply with censorship requests from the Chinese government and following a series of cyberattacks on the company.
Google did not immediately comment.
