The Chinese Commerce Ministry says it will ignore the United States' most recent tariff hikes, calling them a meaningless game, after the U.S. imposed 245 percent tariffs on certain products from China.

"As China itself commented, once you get to numbers like 125, that was one thing they commented that we agree with," Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the World Trade Organization's director-general, said. "It doesn't really matter, because it's a decoupling of trade.”