US trade office lays out Trump’s case against China as ‘Liberation Day’ nears

The United States’ annual report on global trade barriers, released days before President Donald Trump is expected to announce a slew of “reciprocal tariffs”, carries some clues about what markets will be targeted in the future, analysts said – and the considerable volume of pages dedicated to China confirms the world’s second-largest economy will be at the top of Trump’s agenda.

The section on China – which at almost 50 pages dwarfs the limited space dedicated to most other countries – raised “long-standing” concerns, such as Beijing’s failure to fully implement commitments made in the “phase-one” trade deal between the countries signed in 2020.

“The length of the [China section] does illustrate where the US administration’s priorities are. China is likely going to be either the explicit or implicit target of many future US trade actions,” said Nick Marro, principal economist for Asia at the Economist Intelligence Unit.

“All that being said, the inclusion of markets like Australia, Bangladesh, Thailand and Taiwan in the report also suggests these economies aren’t safe either. We can use this as a framework to get a sense of which markets might be next in the firing line and [why].”