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The trade war between the world’s largest and second largest economies is turning into a mess.
A caricature posted in a Hong Kong newspaper.
President Trump is building up a wall.
In the back, the symbol of China, panda, is having a complicated expression.
This expressed the trade war between the US and China which now the world is paying attention to.
At 13:01, 24 Sept 2018 Japan time, The United States levied tariffs of 10% on 5,745 goods imported from China.
What does this mean?
In the first place, applying high tariffs means that the price of Chinese products entering the US will increase.
As for China, goods will be “hard to be exported” to the US.
This time, the targeted goods are eel, and then the daily necessities such as shampoo, skin toner, toilet papers. And then, carpet, also, bicycle is also a targeted goods.
The targeted goods range from food to daily necessities.
Why does the US impose high tariff on goods imported from China?
The trigger is that IT technology of the US enterprises is stolen by China and the copy goods are on China market.
In addition, the US has a trade deficit of about 42 trillion yen with China.
President Trump is accusing that “the US is exploited by China”.
At the same time, it is seen that he holds a view that he doesn’t want to lose the economic supremacy of the US to China.
For this reason, the US imposed tariffs on goods imported from China firstly in July 2018.
Then, as a retaliatory measure, China also imposed tariffs in the same amount of goods imported from the US.
Last month, when the US imposed the second round of the tariff, China also retaliated.
And then today, as the third round, the US targeted goods worth 22.5 trillion yen which is the largest amount ever.
This is about half of the total import amount from China.
China immediately took retaliatory measure today and imposed tariffs worth 6.7 trillion yen.
Then, President Trump announced that there may be a fourth round of tariff targeting about 30 trillion yen of Chinese goods, if this is imposed, almost all goods imported from China are targeted.
There is a diversity of acceptance of this trade war inside the US.
People supporting this policy expect that while the imports from China decrease, “the works taken away by China may come back”.
On the other hand, many people think that “I’d be troubled if the cheap Chinese goods don’t enter the US”.
The impact is insidiously approaching Japan.
In the manufacturing industry in Japan, there are companies that set up their production bases in China so that they can produce goods at a lower cost than in Japan.
While there are cases that the goods are exported to the US from China after production, if the tariff is levied, the merit of having production in China would decrease.
For this reason, the companies take action by shifting the production of goods to be exported to the US from China to other Asian countries and Japan.
The landing point of this messy conflict is not seen at all.
Lighthizer-shi, the current US Trade Representative is known as a “hardliner on China”.
A trade official said, “we are only thinking about crushing China”.
In regard to this, the China government released a white paper today criticizing the US.
The white paper stated that the US “abandoned the fundamental norms of mutual respect and equal consultation that guide international relations”.
Source: http://www.ntv.co.jp/zero/ichimen/2018/09/post-369.html
