White House releases list of possible tariffs

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Tuesday escalated the brewing trade war with China by releasing a long list of imports that could soon be slapped with 25 percent tariffs.

The move is likely to be met with retaliatory action from China and could further rattle stock markets and raise fears of higher consumer prices in China and the U.S.

The proposed new tariffs amount to $12.5 billion on about $50 billion in goods. They would affect hundreds of China-made products such as semiconductors, car and aircraft parts and machine tools.

Even so, some economists see the tit-for-tat actions and increasing rhetoric on both sides as brinkmanship leading to possible direct talks that could still prevent a trade conflict from spinning out of control.

Trump’s latest tariffs would take effect in June at the earliest and are meant to punish China for intellectual property theft. They would follow Trump’s move last month to impose stiff tariffs on steel and aluminum from China and some other nations, and an earlier action to levy penalties on Chinese solar panels.

China responded Monday to the steel tariffs with its own duties on $3 billion of U.S. pork, dried fruit and steel pipes. And anticipating the upcoming batch of new tariffs, China’s ambassador to Washington, Cui Tiankai, said that Beijing is prepared to meet them eye for eye.

“We will certainly take countermeasures, of the same proportion, and the same scale, same intensity,” Cui said in remarks broadcast on Chinese state televi- sion Tuesday.

But even as both sides ramp up the pressure, there are signs that talks between the two economic rivals are continuing and that some concessions from China may be enough to launch formal negotiations and forestall a trade war.

“I would say the pattern being established is that if trade partners make small concessions that the administration can trumpet, that seems to be sufficient,” said David Dollar, a senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution.

But he added: “I’m certain China will retaliate in some way, as they always have. The risk is, if the administration rolls out more measures and people’s egos get involved, and it ratchets up from there, then it starts to become significant for the U.S. economy.”