Protectionist responses will leave both countries poorer.”

Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations

Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said he does not think Ross’ article necessarily means a tit-for-tat trade war. The council is a nonpartisan think tank based in New York.

“Both the United States and China need to find new ways to negotiate seriously on these issues to try to address some of the challenges and open new market opportunities. Protectionist responses will leave both countries poorer,” Alden told China Daily on Tuesday.

China has called on the US to refrain from discussing the settlement of the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula within the context of Chinese-US trade.

“We believe that the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula and China-US trade relations are issues that are in two completely different domains. It is inappropriate to discuss them together,” Vice-Minister of Commerce Qian Keming said on Monday, noting the huge mutual benefits of bilateral trade.

Alden said he thinks the Office of the US Trade Representative report does not suggest it is preparing specific new sanctions against China, but rather that its highest priority will be to defend the ability of the US to put temporary tariffs on imports through anti-dumping and countervailing duty actions.

“This is a much bigger priority in the Trump administration than in previous administrations. China already is the major target of such US actions, but this report does not suggest any new and imminent actions,” he said.

As of 2016, more than 9 percent of US imports from China were hit with punitive tariffs, compared with just over 2 percent from the rest of the world, according to Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a nonpartisan policy institute in Washington, DC.