China Says US Tariffs ‘Doomed to Be Futile’

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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China Says US Tariffs ‘Doomed to Be Futile’

© Yongyuan Dai / Getty Images

The Chinese government wants the world to know that it is not just upset about a brewing trade war with the United States. It claims that the United States cannot use tariffs to level the playing field as the Trump administration believes it can because such actions are “doomed to be futile.”

The comments come from the Ministry of Commerce and were reported in the government-controlled People’s Daily. The Chinese government is unwilling to give up on diplomacy, even as it threatens tariffs of its own.

A Ministry of Commerce office was quoted as saying:

We always believe, bad things can be turned into good things, and challenges can be converted into opportunities. We have full confidence in achieving the high-quality economic development target.

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In other comments published in the People’s Daily, the government was less conciliatory:

China on Friday announced its decision to impose additional tariffs of four different rates on 5,207 items of imported U.S. products worth 60 billion U.S. dollars. The rates of additional tariffs on such products will be 25 percent, 20 percent, 10 percent, and 5 percent, according to the Customs Tariff Commission of the State Council.

China has adopted a two-pronged approach against the U.S. trade threat. However, the dual efforts do not totally negate one another. China hopes, as the United States does, that harsh tariffs will bring both parties to the bargaining table.

Via its comments to the People’s Daily, the government wants the outside world to look at efforts by the United States as “futile.” It does, however, want to talk.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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