[Serious] What does China have to lose from the tariffs with the USA? Isn’t it mainly the USA buying from China and not the other way around?

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[Serious] What does China have to lose from the tariffs with the USA? Isn’t it mainly the USA buying from China and not the other way around?

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  2. Wild_You8397 Avatar

    They will pay higher on American products if none of them can reach an agreement. The US have a stubborn president so it’s most likely going to happen. 

  3. Magnon Avatar

    Afaik approx 3% of Chinese gdp is exports to the US. So like, some of their money, while the US stands to lose access to the world’s most important manufacturing with no short term way to replace it.

  4. Lumpy_Ad7002 Avatar

    You’ve spotted one of the flaws in trumps insanity

  5. Totheendofsin Avatar

    Stuff imported from China is about to get significantly more expensive for consumers, meaning people will buy it less, which means companies will import less, which means China gets less money from the US

    Make no mistake though this will hurt the US way more than it hurts China, maybe if the US was only tariffing China this plan would work better, but they’ve pissed off everyone

  6. AdvertisingLogical22 Avatar

    His aim is to divert large swathes of Chinese manufacturing to more Trump friendly nations like India and Bangladesh, or at least use the threat of it to gain concessions.

  7. JD1zz Avatar

    China buys a lot of agricultural products from the US, Soybeans is a big one, in 2023 they imported 15B worth of them

  8. Penguin_dingdong Avatar

    I mean most the world buys the same good from China for 50% less. I literally ran a company buying from China for a while so I know the economics but also have personal experience. If the tarrifs drop to just getting the US to be on par globally it is a huge win. But we will never be free trade with China.

  9. NorthernUnIt Avatar

    The fun part is that the US owes China $800 bn.

    US are buying, producing, manufacturing in China, just because of these tariffs, Americans will feel the pain with extras.

  10. Responsible-Doctor26 Avatar

    Absolute nonsense opinions given here. China absolutely will be hurt more. I’m old enough to remember the early 1980s when everyone said Japan was taking over the world. Look what happened. It’s absolutely the same with China. It’s going to be so much worse for them than Japan. 

    China is unbelievably unstable, unlike post-war Japan. With tens of millions of people losing their jobs it is a tinder box waiting. The Communist party made a deal with the people of China in which personal liberties are surrendered in return for economic growth and better lives. Without United States trade that promise is going to go by the wayside. Remember that in China things can go very bad quickly.

    On a side note I’m recently retired as a teacher in Queens. I’m very friendly with several Chinese born teachers. They still return to China to visit family once a year. They tell me that many parts of their tier one cities are economic ghost towns in many places. There is also a very strong likelihood that China does not have 1.4 billion people that they report. It would not surprise me if the death toll during covid reached hundreds of millions and birth records have been jury rigged all across the Nation by politicians desperate to get tax revenue sent to them. I hate being a conspiracy theorist about China but that looks more and more likely. It’s a House of cards with many places a potemkin village. If you believe the published government statistics by the Chinese government then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you really cheap. In fact, China is even ceased publishing many economic and population statistics because they look very bad.

  11. MRKent1929 Avatar

    Is China going to continue to rip off its largest customer?

  12. Frustrateduser02 Avatar

    If this becomes a back and forth, they do import a lot of food though I’m not sure if it’s included.

  13. Dunoh2828 Avatar

    Did the same with Australia over all the meat they import from us.

    Yet we’re happy about it because we get to keep the better quality meats now 😂

  14. EqualJustice1776 Avatar

    The U.S. is BY FAR their biggest customer. They have everything to lose. And so do we. Nobody wins a trade war.

  15. ResidentSheeper Avatar

    They lose their biggest customer.

    And they lose the inflow of money that has lifted them out of poverty.

  16. bllueace Avatar

    with each passing day America is digging a deeper and deeper hole. Good thing is at this rate they will be too busy internally to go after Greenland or any of the other crazy shit trump has claimed.

  17. killerkali87 Avatar

    Going after China like this MIGHT work if we hadn’t burned our bridges with all of our allies and they all were on board…but alas 

  18. GaryLifts Avatar

    Higher prices mean less demand – normally this hurts the selling country a bit more when the US is involved, but in this case, there is no ready made replacement for China, so people will still continue buying from them, just at a higher price.

    I do expect pressure on Chinese sellers to reduce costs too, but they will not be absorbing the entire tariff; it may not even be possible.

  19. EurOblivion Avatar

    Yes, both buy from each other. And with the tariffs and counter tariffs that won’t be interesting anymore. So who can replace the other faster?

    Considering Trumps drive-by-shooting style of diplomacy, the unpredictability of his decision-making and the untrustworthyness of his signature on any treaty, the most logical solution for the world (minus a handful of countries on US side (e.g.Russia) , or embargoed (e.g. Syria)) is to reorganise globalisation to work around these countries rather than through them.

  20. Lokon19 Avatar

    They lose out on sales because everything gets more expensive and people can’t afford it. When you lose out on sales you lose out on business and eventually you have to lay people off.

  21. Wazza17 Avatar

    The US consumer is going to feel more pain than the Chinese consumer is. The only consolation is MAGAs and those who voted for will also feel the pain

  22. Naive_Objective_5733 Avatar

    The United States is China’s main market. If United States makes it hard for China to sell its products here, which is just about everything you pick up, sad, China will lose billions and billions of dollars. China can’t afford to play the long game with America on the Tariff war. They’re economy is to dependent on United States. United States needs to become a manufacturing country again. We are dependent on China and other countries for everything. We should have never let this happen. But companies are greedy. Why not move factories to China or Mexico and pay workers one dollar an hour. No health insurance, no pension, no unions. Basically no regulations. I’ll pay extra to bring manufacturing and jobs back to America

  23. seclifered Avatar

    We’ve already seen what happens. when China outlawed buying coal from Australia, India and other countries bought Australian coal and sold it to China at a higher price. That’s essentially what’s going to happen here. Countries with lower tariffs will buy cheap chinese goods and sell it to America for a profit. China’s exports will shift but not really fall bc that’s just how capitalism works. So China doesn’t care what random number Trump sets the tariff to since market forces will cause middlemen to step in and buy from them. China buys way less from us, so it’s a loss they’re willing to take.

    American goods will become more expensive, but manufacturing won’t come back to the US bc it’s still cheaper to simply route goods thru another country and pay the tariffs than pay high US labor costs. Trump is not promoting American manufacturing subsidies or anything to help his “goals” happen because he has no plan, just mindless urges to do whatever crosses his mind that day.

  24. john_jdm Avatar

    The tariffs are meant to make imported goods so expensive that people will buy goods made in the USA instead. Of course practically nothing is made in the USA anymore, so we’ll just end up either doing without or paying for those tariffs through much, much higher prices on the imported goods we buy.

  25. gambit61 Avatar

    Trump thinks that putting Tariffs on other countries will cause them to do what he wants. He straight up admitted he wanted to raise Tariffs on Canada until they willingly became the 51st state. That’s how stupid he is. He doesn’t know what products we get from what country, and he doesn’t care. Somehow he got it in his mind that other countries pay to bring their products here, and by implementing Tariffs he’s making them pay more money. That’s not how it works, but he’s too stupid to know that, and he’s too ignorant to care. On a personal note, anyone who has ever supported Trump is Stupid, Evil, or both and I can’t wait until he and all his supporters are gone.

  26. mrpoopistan Avatar

    American has a capital surplus that makes it the biggest gorilla on the block globally by far.

    Bear in mind, America controls the world’s reserve currency in large part because no one trusts any of the other contenders. China literally has to manipulate its currency to stay at something of a stable level with the dollar. You need dollars to keep that up. Otherwise, the yuan/renminbi (it’s weird, but there are two names for China’s currency depending on the context) would settle to a much lower level. This would leave all of China relatively poorer.

    Why does that matter? China imports lots of food from America and lots of oil from the Middle East. China can’t afford for its currency to collapse, otherwise its whole society will grind to a halt. Food and energy prices would skyrocket.

    So to answer the question, what China stands to lose is its next meal.

  27. loganedwards Avatar

    Bottom line is Chinese citizens have to accept whatever their government chooses to do. They’ll patriotically buy more of the surplus goods that were meant for the US. They’ll lower their prices to ship more goods to non US trading partners. There will be pain, but they’ve been through much much worse not that long ago

    And in the US, the citizens will vote out as many of these GOP sycophants as possible 21 months from now.

    Any business built on Chinese exports like Nike, Apple, Walmart and hundred thousand more will have empty shelves, mass layoffs, store closures, struggle to pay their debts, tens of thousands of small businesses will close.

    Millions of US workers will be laid off, inflation will increase, and thusly enter a painful recession or depression spiral because most other nations affected by these tariffs will boycott US goods and services as Canada is doing. Even when new deals are made, the citizens will remember and continue their boycotts.

    US vs any one nation could make a reasonable be on that. But US unleashing economic warfare on the entire world at the same time… good fucking luck with that!

    Its not longer about will there be damage to the US economy. At this point, the damage is certain. Its now about how deep and for how long US will bleed out from shooting itself in the foot with a bazooka wondering why the entire world isn’t bowing to what’s left of their feet.

  28. ipub Avatar

    Nobody wins an R race. Americans will buy less consumer goods because who is paying 100% more on temu stuff and entire supply chains will collapse because when you look at the components of literally anything in America, a fair chunk of it from screws to motors will be made in china. This will be devastating for America and it will cost jobs. The impact to china is they sell less, guy less and that will reflect in prices to their customers across the world. It’s fairly likely even just this tarrif will result in an economic Shockwave.

  29. Frostsorrow Avatar

    China could cut 100% of trade and barely notice it while it would completely cripple the US almost instantly.

  30. LobMob Avatar

    The tariffs will cause prices to rise in the USA. That’s bad.

    Losing US customers will cause entire chinese industries to collapse and makes the entire economic model of export driven growth of China obsolete.

    The US trade deficit in goods is about twice of that of the rest of the world combined. Chinese companies can not find other customers for all their goods unless Europeans, Latin Americans, and the rest of Asia want to destroy their domestic industries.

  31. surloc_dalnor Avatar

    The irony is it would have been bad, but Trump’s tariffs are hitting everyone else. But our allies we could buy from are hits as bad or worse than China. Most importers are likely to just stick with China.

  32. pastreaver Avatar

    Well most people already know that Chinese goods have the possibility to sell less in the United States.. but what really is going to hurt China is all the big USA companies that have been producing cutting edge tech, Ex. apple, Nvidia, meta, alphabet, Microsoft, Oracle, etc will be moving all of their manufacturing back to the USA. Since most of the world still uses U.S tech and service rather than Chinese, this will impact china significantly as well as the newly formed trade barriers

  33. Usernamecheckout101 Avatar

    Jobs. No export, no selling , factory shut down, cost people jobs.. also their companies move out to build factory in other countries…

    Having said that.. Americans don’t want 3500 iPhone .. Americans want to wear Nike and not making Nike shirts and shoes and Chappell have said

  34. swomismybitch Avatar

    So many ‘american’ products have a large chinese component, iPhones for example, that the Trump tariffs make them very expensive or even uneconomicsl. What does he think will happen?

    Note that the tariffs are on tangible items, services are not included. The non-tangible trade with china, and most other countries, is mostly tipped in favour of the US which is why Trump does not include it. As the trae wr escalates non-tangibles will look vulnerable. Things like banking, financial services, consultancy, social media etc

  35. darthTharsys Avatar

    Honestly once China stops obeying IP rights it’s over for a lot of businesses in the U.S.

  36. JimTheSaint Avatar

    Yes – so tariffs on those good will make them a lot more expensive to the consumers – which means that they will buy less in China. It will suck for the consumers and for China.

  37. sigint_bn Avatar

    And couldn’t like China buy stuff from the US *without* tariffs, effectively letting whoever needs it in their country buy stuff without any additional tariff burden to their importers? I don’t get what retalionary tariffs would get these countries?