AFP, Beijing

US President Donald Trump has slapped punishing new tariffs on imports of Chinese goods, deepening a trade war between the world’s two largest economies.

Beijing has vowed countermeasures in response and warned the new tariffs will cripple global supply chains -- and Washington’s own interests.

AFP looks at how so-called “liberation day” tariffs -- which bring levies on Chinese goods to 54 percent -- will hit China:

Why is China so vulnerable?

China’s export-driven economy is particularly sensitive to vicissitudes in international trade. Trade between it and the United States, the world’s two largest economies, is vast.

According to Beijing’s customs data, sales of Chinese goods to the United States last year totalled more than $500 billion -- 16.4 percent of the country’s exports.

US duties also threaten to harm China’s fragile economic recovery as it struggles with a long-running debt crisis in the property sector and persistently low consumption -- a downturn Beijing had sought to slow with broad fiscal stimulus last year.

But an intensified trade war will likely mean China cannot peg its hopes for strong economic growth this year on its exports, which reached record highs in 2024.

“The US tariffs on Chinese imports announced so far this year could fully negate the lift from the fiscal stimulus measures announced so far,” Frederic Neumann, Chief Asia Economist at HSBC, told AFP.

And while he said the impact on export competition may be slightly mitigated by the fact that all countries are hit by the levies, he stressed “the drag on Chinese growth is nevertheless significant”.

What impact will the new tariffs have?

The new tariffs slap 10 percent levies on imports from around the world.

But China -- whose yawning trade deficit with the United States of $270.4 billion has long drawn Trump’s ire -- faces much higher levies.

The latest salvo adds 34 percent to a 20 percent rate imposed last month, bringing the total additional tariffs on imports from the Asian economic powerhouse imposed by the Trump administration to 54 percent.

The tariffs come into effect in stages -- a ten percentage point bump on Thursday, followed by the full levy on April 9. China is also under sector-specific tariffs on steel, aluminium and car imports.

Analysts expect the new levies to take a significant chunk out of the country’s GDP, which Beijing’s leadership hope will grow five percent this year.

Julian Evans-Pritchard, Head of China Economics at Capital Economics, said in a note he said he expected the economic hit to range from 0.5 percent to one percent of GDP.