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President Donald Trump said there may be a point where he doesn’t want to put higher tariffs on China because the move could deter buying.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump said he may not raise tariffs if China goes beyond the 125% duty it has on American goods.
“At a certain point, I don’t want them to go higher because at a certain point, you make it where people don’t buy,” Trump said when a reporter asked what happens if China raises tariffs on the US.
“I may not want to go higher, or I may not want to even go up to that level — I may want to go to less, because you want people to buy, and at a certain point, people aren’t going to buy,” he added.
Earlier on Thursday, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it wouldn’t pay attention to Trump’s “tariff numbers game” after the White House said Chinese exports face a levy of up to 245%. Last week, Beijing called escalating US tariffs a “joke” and said they no longer hold “any economic significance.”
China is the third-largest buyer of US goods, behind Canada and Mexico. According to US government figures, China bought $143.5 billion worth of American products last year.
In addition to tariffs, China and the US have imposed various punitive measures on each other in the escalating trade war. China has curbed the import of Hollywood films, and earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that Beijing asked its airlines to stop taking deliveries from Boeing. The US said that companies selling H20 chips to China will need a license, a move analysts said is essentially a ban on exporting those chips.
On Thursday, Trump added that he and Chinese leader Xi Jinping have a “very good relationship” and said Xi has reached out to him “a number of times.”
The president on Thursday also commented on TikTok, whose fate in the US remains unclear.
“We have a deal for TikTok, but it’ll be subject to China, so we’ll just delay the deal till this thing works out one way or the other,” Trump said, responding to a question about whether he would consider reducing tariffs to complete a TikTok deal.
TikTok’s parent company faces a summer deadline to divest its US operations or face removal from US app stores. Trump has twice pushed back the deadline.
Among the parties who have expressed interest in acquiring TikTok’s US operations are Amazon, Oracle, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, and the YouTuber MrBeast.
“If we’re making a deal, I guess we’ll spend five minutes to talk about TikTok, it wouldn’t take very long,” Trump said.
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