In a statement from China’s Ministry of Finance, which we’ve translated using Google, the country says that any further tariffs from the US side would “no longer make economic sense,” and that the US “will become a joke in the history of the world economy.”
China says that at the new tariff rate of 125 percent there is no longer any “market acceptance for US goods exported to China,” so there’s no sense in raising tariffs further. “If the US continues to play the tariff numbers game, China will ignore it,” the statement says.
China isn’t ruling out other forms of retaliation, however, ending the statement with a warning: “If the US insists on continuing to substantially infringe on China’s interests, China will resolutely counterattack and fight to the end.” Yesterday the country announced it was reducing the number of Hollywood films it would permit to release, and over the last week it has also restricted import and export rights for a number of US companies.
The graph doesn’t even make clear if it’s using inflation adjusted USD (which is the only fair way to compare trade numbers over a period of decades) or just nominal annualized USD (where 1 USD represents quite a different amount of worth in 1990 than it does in 2025).
That is not a positive indication on the competence of the people doing it, and it seems unlikely that they fucked up something as basic as this whilst at the same time being professional enough to dig up and include information on estimated rerouted trade flows (which would be a lot more work to obtain).
Mind you, inflation adjusted USD wouldn’t really change the trend, but it would change the steepness of the growth over the years, plus it’s just the proper way to represent such data.