China has been secretly halting exports of major U.S. commodities in a stealthy attempt to undermine Donald Trump’s trade war and punish Americans.
While Beijing has matched Trump’s 125 percent tariff with one of its own against US-imported goods, they have also been using nontariff barriers to hit the president’s supporters the hardest, Politico reported.
Over the past four months, China has halted or significantly curtailed direct key U.S. agriculture and energy exports.
Many of these exports include U.S. farm goods, such beef, poultry and liquified natural gas.
Those resources are largely produced in red states whose voters are far more likely to be Trump supporters, with China likely calculating that any pain people there feel could be used to undermine the president himself.
‘A tariff, you can just pay it, and things just get more costly,’ said Ben Lilliston, director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. ‘But this is a full restriction on your ability to send product to that country.’
China declined to renew export licenses for hundreds of meatpacking plants, claiming the products are genetically modified or unsanitary.
The escalating trade war reached a fever pitch last week when the president boosted the tariffs on China to a whopping 125 percent.
Trump did grant some relief by sparring iPhones, laptops and other electronics from his brutal tariffs, with the majority of those gadgets made in the communist nation.