US President Donald Trump on Friday announced an additional 100 percent tariff on China and threatened to cancel a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, reigniting his trade war with Beijing over restrictions on exports of rare earth minerals.
Trump said the additional tariffs, plus U.S. export controls on “all critical software,” would take effect from Nov. 1 in retaliation for what he called Beijing’s “extremely aggressive” moves.
“It is impossible to believe that China would have taken such an action, but they did, and the rest is history,” he said on Truth Social.
China’s retaliatory tariffs currently stand at 10 percent.
Trump had threatened the tariffs hours earlier in a lengthy surprise post on his Truth Social network, saying China had sent letters to countries around the world detailing export controls on rare earth minerals.
China dominates global production and processing of rare earth elements, which are crucial for the production of everything from smartphones and electric vehicles to military hardware and renewable energy technology.
“There is no way that China is ‘capturing’ the world,” Trump said on his Truth Social network.
The US president cast doubt on his plans to meet Xi at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit later this month, which would be their first meeting since Trump returned to power in January.
“In two weeks I was supposed to meet President Xi at APEC in South Korea, but now there seems to be no reason,” he said.
Trump later told reporters in the Oval Office that he had not canceled the meeting.
“I haven’t canceled, but I don’t know if we’ll have it. But I’ll be there anyway, so I guess we might have it,” he said.
There was no immediate response from Beijing.
‘Lurk’
The American president said he did not understand why China was taking action now. “There are some very strange things happening in China! They are becoming very hostile,” he said.
Trump said other countries had contacted the United States to express their anger over China’s “major trade hostility, which came out of nowhere.”
“Depending on what China says about the hostile ‘order’ they just issued, I as President of the United States of America will be forced to financially counter their move,” Trump said.
His outburst comes just weeks after he spoke about the importance of meeting Xi at the APEC summit and revealed he would travel to China next year.
Washington and Beijing engaged in a tit-for-tat tariff war earlier this year that threatened to effectively halt trade between the world’s two largest economies.
Both sides eventually agreed to de-escalate tensions, but the truce was shaky.
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