China ready to impose tariffs on $16 bln worth of US products

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02:34

China has decided to impose an additional tariff of 25 percent on 16 billion dollars’ worth of US goods, the Customs Tariff Commission of China's State Council announced on Wednesday.

The decision followed the US announcing that it will begin imposing a similar tariff on 16 billion US dollars' worth of Chinese goods on Aug. 23, said the commission.

The US has once again put domestic law above international law by imposing “very unreasonable” new tariffs on Chinese goods, said China's Commerce Ministry in a statement on Wednesday.

Statement from China's Commerce Ministry

The ministry said China has to safeguard its own legitimate interests as well as the multilateral trading system by taking countermeasures.

The tariff list published by the US includes commodities such as semiconductors, electronics, plastics, chemicals and railway equipment.

China’s tariff list covers automobiles, energy, and chemical raw materials.

Ford Motor vehicles are on display at a car dealership in Shanghai, China, on Sunday, July 8, 2018. /VCG Photo

There are more than 150 kinds of automobile products on the list, which is the focus of China’s countermeasures, ranging from road tractors, trucks of various types to passenger cars and small cars and covering almost all imported automobile products from the US.

Last year, China imported over 1.2 million vehicles, 280,002 of which were from the US.

The US government already imposed additional tariffs on 34 billion dollars of Chinese products on July 6, and China hit back with an equal amount, inflicting heavy losses on the US agricultural and manufacturing industry.