China has hit back at the US after President Donald Trump imposed a tariff on items shipped from the East Asian country.
The new POTUS implemented the tariffs as he seeks to tackle what the White House has described as an ‘extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl’.
When it comes to China specifically, a press release from the White House claimed Chinese officials had ‘failed to take the actions necessary to stem the flow of precursor chemicals to known criminal cartels and shut down money laundering by transnational criminal organizations’
February 4, 2024 – the day Trump‘s trade war began, and within minutes of the tariffs taking effect, President Xi Jinping retaliated.
What are tariffs?
President Donald Trump has started a trade war with China after imposing a 10 percent tariff on goods shipped from the East Asian country (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Tariffs are taxes imposed on foreign goods, meaning many of these goods will cost more to sell in the US – so ultimately, the consumer will pay.
Advanced countries fell out of favor with tariffs following World War II, because they often lead to ‘reduced trade, higher prices for consumers, and retaliation from abroad’, the Council on Foreign Relations reports… which is what we’ve seen from China.
On Saturday (February 1), Trump signed an executive order to impose 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, while all energy resources from the US’ northern neighbor faced just a 10 percent tariff, as well as an additional 10 percent tariff on shipped goods from China – coming into play today (February 4).
China’s response to Trump’s tariffs
Jinping has hit back at Trump following levies imposed on Chinese goods by the US (ANTHONY KWAN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
China’s Finance Ministry has announced plans to impose taxes of 15 percent on coal and liquified natural gas from the US, as well as a 10 percent levy on crude oil, farming equipment and some cars. These will come into play on Monday (February 10).
The nation has also released a statement detailing plans to investigate Google.
It read: “Because Google is suspected of violating the Anti-Monopoly Law of the People’s Republic of China, the State Administration for Market Regulation has initiated an investigation into Google in accordance with the law.”
Meanwhile, the Chinese Commerce Ministry and its Customs Administration claimed it was also imposing export controls to ‘safeguard national security interests’ on tellurium, molybdenum, tungsten, ruthenium and ruthenium-related items.
UNILAD has contacted Google for comment.
Why Trump imposed tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico
Trump speaks with Chinese President Xi Jinping after a handshake at the G20 Summit in Osaka, back during Trump’s first term in charge (KIM KYUNG-HOON/AFP via Getty Images)
The Republican claims Canada, Mexico and China pose an ‘extraordinary threat’ due to the number of ‘illegal aliens and drugs’ smuggled into the States, and even constitutes it as a ‘national emergency’.
In regards to China specifically, the White House added: “In response to China’s intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer, and other unreasonable behavior, President Trump acted with conviction to impose tariffs on imports from China, using that leverage to reach a historic bilateral economic agreement.”
It all stems from a talk he gave to the House GOP (Grand Old Party, otherwise known as the Republican Party) retreat in Florida, toward the end of last month.
There he vowed to end federal income taxes, in favor of taxing foreign countries through tariffs – which he has done so far with China, while suspending the taxes imposed on Canada and Mexico’s shipped goods after both agreed to send more forces to the border.
If you’re thinking of splashing out on a new cell phone, you might want to do so before tomorrow – with prices hikes imminent.
Mobiles aren’t the only necessities expected to cost a fair chunk more, in fact there are six other items that all might be worth buying before President Donald Trump‘s tariffs take effect, according to the Daily Mail.
On Saturday (February 1), Donald Trump signed off on an order imposing ‘catastrophic’ tariffs to ‘hold China, Mexico and Canada accountable for their promises to halt the flood of poisonous drugs into the US’.
The order places 25 percent tariffs on goods imported from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent tax on China and to back this further, Trump also declared a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Without further ado, let’s get into it.
President Donald Trump announced that Canada and Mexico were going to face a 25 percent import tax on good sold in the US, while China will face a 10 percent tariff (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Cell phones
It isn’t the first time China has had tariffs placed on goods it’s wanting to sell in the US, the only difference now is that smartphones manufactured in the East Asian country will cost 10 percent more for to sell them in the States.
In a 2021 United Nations report, China accounted for 30.5 percent of all cell phones manufactured worldwide – with tech giants Apple opting for many of its products to be created overseas in China rather than in America.
Liquor
If you’re a fan of tequila or whisky, then you may want to grab your ID and head to your local liquor store because alcohol is among the list of things the US relies heavily on from Mexico and Canada.
According to the trade group Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, in 2023 Canada imported the second-most amount of spirits into the US, with Mexico importing the third-most – only the European Union (EU) shipped more into the country.
Mexico imported $4.6 billion worth of tequila into the US in the same year, while $108 million worth of mezcal also crossed the same border.
Meanwhile, $202.5 million worth of whisky was imported from Canada, with a further $537m worth of spirits also coming from the US’ northern neighbors in 2023.
American whiskey shipping to the EU is set to face a huge 50 percent tariff, with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau already telling Americans Canada will impose a 25 percent tariff on all US items – with Mexico expected to follow suit.
The price of foreign liquor shipped to the US is set to increase (Getty stock)
Cars and auto parts
Over one in five cars and light trucks sold in the US are reportedly built either side of the US’ borders. In 2023, $106 billion worth of motors were shipped into the US from Mexico and Canada – $69 billion from the south, and $37 billion from the north.
Meanwhile, a further $98 billion worth of car parts also came from the two countries – $78 billion from Mexico and $20 billion from Canada.
Popular toy trucks
If you’re a parent you may be familiar with Tonka trucks, or you might have even had one as a child yourself – which is likely to be the case with a large portion of Americans with more than one million sold in the US each year.
Unfortunately, they are all manufactured in China – so if you thought they were already an expensive present for your kids… they could soon be a little more costly.
Gasoline and crude oil
This could be the thing that hurts Americans the most, or one that is the most obvious.
In January to November last year, the US’ northern neighbor sent $90 billion worth of crude oil to the US, while Mexico shipped $11 billion.
It comes as no surprise that Canada is the largest importer of crude oil into the country, with Mexico in second place.
While Canadian oil is currently set to be hit with a 10 percent tariff rather than a 25 percent one, it could still have a big impact on consumers.
Tariffs on Canadian oil imports is expected to push up prices of gasoline – with TD Economics suggesting it could cost around 30 to 70 cents more per gallon to fill up your motor.
The price of gas could go up by 40 cents per gallon (Getty stock)
Fruit and veg
The price of an avocado and or a pack of tomatoes may go up due to the Trump’s tariffs.
The US purchased over $45 billion in food and farming products from Mexico in 2023 – with almost two-thirds of all imported veg coming from the US’ southern neighbor, as well as just under half of all fruits and nuts shipped to the country.
Donald Trump has issued a warning after a new Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) app brought havoc upon the US stock market.
The release of chatbot DeepSeek on January 20 has seen chip-maker Nvidia’s stock price fall by almost $600 billion.
Now, the US president has declared it a ‘wake-up call’ for American companies who must focus on ‘competing to win’.
It comes as Donald Trump last week confirmed plans for a $500 billion AI project called Stargate, backed by tech giants including Microsoft, Oracle, OpenAI and, somewhat ironically now, Nvidia.
Trump claimed Stargate would further cement the US’ position as AI world leaders, which has seemingly been challenged already.
What is DeepSeek?
Similar to ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and others, DeepSeek is an AI chatbot app that can answer question and queries.
The company was launched in 2023 by entrepreneur Liang Wenfeng, the co-founder of quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer.
DeepSeek released to app stores on January 20 and has already flown to the top of download charts in the US, UK and elsewhere.
While DeepSeek fails to answer certain politically sensitive questions, developers say its general performance is on a par with its high-profile US rivals.
DeepSeek released to app stores on January 20 (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
How does DeepSeek work?
Powered by the open source DeepSeek-V3 model, its researchers claim the AI model was trained for around $6 million.
This is significantly less than the billions that have been spent by rivals.
What’s more, the Chinese company claims it uses eight times less the amount of specialized chips to do so.
DeepSeek was supposedly trained on 2,000 GPU chips compared to an estimated 16,000 for leading models.
OpenAI chief Sam Altman praised the business for its ‘impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price’, though he added that OpenAI would ‘obviously deliver much better models’ moving forward.
Nvidia has lost almost $600 billion in market value (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Chip export ban
Back in 2022, the US restricted exports of these all-important chips to China, from companies including Nvidia and AMD.
The government claimed it was in an effort to mitigate national security concerns.
However, Wenfeng High-Flyer is said to have amassed a stockpile of Nvidia high-performance processor chips that are used to run AI systems.
Now, DeepSeek says its recent AI models have been built using lower-performing Nvidia chips not banned in China.
Not everyone is convinced though, with tech billionaire Elon Musk among those casting doubt.
Responding to a post which claimed DeepSeek actually has around ‘50,000 Nvidia chips that have now been banned from export to China,’ the Tesla CEO said: “Obviously.”
Why did DeepSeek cause Nvidia to lose market shares?
Being a new rival to ChatGPT is not enough in itself to upend the US stock market, but the apparent low cost for its development – and its use of chips not banned in China – has been.
Nvidia appears to have been hit the worst as its stock price plunged 17 percent in the space of one day, tumbling to $2.9 trillion from $3.5 trillion, as per Forbes.
The blow saw the chip maker slip from most valuable company in the world by market capitalization to third on, behind Apple and Microsoft.
So, DeepSeek has shown the US may not be the dominant market leader in AI many thought it to be, and that cutting edge AI models can be built and trained for less than first thought.
DeepSeek CEO Liang said in a July 2024 interview with The China Academy he was surprised by the reaction to a previous version of his AI model.
“We didn’t expect pricing to be such a sensitive issue,” he said. “We were simply following our own pace, calculating costs, and setting prices accordingly.”
Scientists may have just taken one step closer to bringing the world unlimited clean renewable energy.
Scientists in China say they have exceeded their expectations and achieved a new milestone after an energy test.
The researchers have attempting to create a viable power generation through nuclear fusion and it has been deemed the ‘holy grail’ for clean energy.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has said that is nuclear reactor, dubbed the ‘artificial sun’, successfully ran twice as long as their previous test. It ran for 1,066 seconds, just over 17 minutes.
The idea of replicating the Sun’s nuclear fusion process hasn’t just been relegated to science fiction as scientists around the world have experimented continuously to make it a reality.
The successful experiment is said to be an important step forward (Zhang Yazi/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images)
Mastering this process could provide humanity with a limitless clean energy source. An artificial sun reactor has the possibility to avoid the pitfalls of other energy sources, as it would not produce the emissions like fossil fuels, or leave behind any hazardous waste like that seen from the fission process in nuclear power plants.
A nuclear fusion reactor would merge atomic nuclei, generating massive amounts of energy in the process that can be turned into electricity.
In a statement CAS said that its reactor, the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (East) smashed the previous operating time of only 403 seconds.
The statement said: “The duration of 1,066 seconds is a critical advancement in fusion research.”
The quest for this perfect energy source isn’t without its hurdles, however.
Researchers must find a viable way to ensure the reactor can consistently reach temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius, while maintaining stable long term operation. As well as this, scientists will need to have precise control over the nuclear fusion process.
Scientists analysing the results from their latest artificial sun test (Zhang Dagang/VCG via Getty Images)
The vice president at CAS’s Hefei Institutes of Physical Science Song Yuntao said to enable the self-sustaining circulation of the fourth state of matter, plasma, a fusion device must achieve ‘stable operation at high efficiency for thousands of seconds’.
This new milestone was able to be achieved thanks to upgrades to East since the last round of experiments. Most notably scientists doubled the power output of the heating system.
These achievements, according to researchers, provide ‘invaluable insights’ and references for the global development of a functional nuclear fusion reactor.
Only time will tell if we are still complaining about energy prices in the next couple decades.
.jpg)
While Donald Trump may have criticized Barack Obama for the time he spent on the golf course during his presidency, the businessman-turned-politician spent substantially more time playing the sport.
Before running for office for the first time, Trump honed in on how many days Obama spent on the course rather thatn in the Oval Office.
He tweeted back in 2014 while Obama was president: “We pay for Obama’s travel so he can fundraise millions so Democrats can run on lies. Then we pay for his golf.”
Donald Trump often criticized Barack Obama’s golfing habits (Twitter)
But fast -orward to when Trump came into office, and he hardly stopped taking part in his favorite pastime.
The Trump Organization owns 18 different golf resorts across the globe, its website states, and the President frequently visits his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in particular.
There are different reports on how many times Trump frequented the golf course during his first four years in office, but figures range from 248 to 266 days, CNN reported.
In comparison, Obama played around 333 rounds during his eight years as president, according to CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller.
But, as Trump’s aides typically refused to confirm if he was visiting his golf resorts for business or pleasure (despite being pictured in his golf attire), the amount of time he actually spent playing the sport is unknown.
The Trump Organization owns 18 different golf resorts (Rich Graessle/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Regardless, he still spent a lot of time traveling to the resorts that just so happened to have golf courses – and presidential travel isn’t cheap.
In 2019, The Washington Post predicted that Trump’s travel would cost taxpayers $64 million, but by October 2020, Robert Reich, author and former Labor secretary, calculated that Trump had cost taxpayers and eye-watering $141 million.
He tweeted at the time: “Once again, Trump brags about donating his $400,000 presidential salary.
“Somehow he forgot to mention that his golf trips have cost taxpayers $141,000,000.”
.jpg)
Trump’s travel reportedly cost taxpayers $140 million (Noam Galai/Getty Images)
Just one weekend spent in Scotland in 2018 cost taxpayers more than $1 million, The Committee on Oversight and Accountability Democrats reported.
Addressing this two years later, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, the Chairwoman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Senator Tom Carper, and Senator Elizabeth Warren said in a statement: “American taxpayers should not be on the hook for President Trump’s golf weekend to a property he owns as a private businessman.
“The President has consistently abused the levers of government to promote his own personal enrichment, and we are calling on him today to reimburse the American people for the more than $1 million price tag for this unnecessary and wasteful trip. This is their money—not his—and he should return it to them immediately.”
