Beijing is showing the Trump administration that tariffs aren’t the only weapon in a trade war.
Long before President Donald Trump fired the opening shots of a new U.S.-China trade war from the White House Rose Garden last week, Beijing had been working to perfect its stealth campaign blocking key U.S. agriculture and energy exports. The Chinese government over the past four months has halted or significantly curtailed direct exports of major U.S. commodities including beef, poultry and liquified natural gas through an array of bureaucratic blocks and tricky third-party sales deals.
The so-called nontariff barriers to trade are even stickier than the escalating tariffs rippling across the global economy, analysts said. All together, the moves are an escalation of the curbs China has been honing since its bans on genetically modified foods a decade ago. And they provide Beijing added firepower in the ongoing U.S.-China trade war by targeting exports from Trump-friendly, deep-red states — think Iowa and Nebraska — with restrictions immune to possible workarounds for tariff barriers.
“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.”
The Chinese government knows where it can pinch U.S. exporters hardest. It has already declined to renew export licenses for hundreds of meatpacking plants, alleged that some U.S. chicken products contain unwanted drugs and stopped importing U.S. natural gas. Those industry targets also happen to be some of the president’s most ardent political supporters.
Such tactics underscore the dexterity of Beijing’s response to rising U.S.-China trade tensions — and its years of preparation for a new trade war. What began as an additional 50 percent tariff that raised levies on Chinese imports to north of 104 percent Wednesday turned into a 145 percent tariff level a little over 12 hours later. That second increase came after Beijing upped its own tariffs on U.S. goods to a total levy of 84 percent. Beijing’s counter-tariff reprisal pushed levies on U.S. imports to 125 percent Friday.
The playbook is one that the Chinese government has finessed since entering the World Trade Organization in 2001. Beijing almost immediately beat back a flood of foreign imports of commodities, including soybeans, through questionable claims that they contained insect infestations or genetically modified organisms.
After the Canadian government detained a senior executive of Chinese telecom giant Huawei in 2018, Beijing suspended a large percentage of Canadian canola oil seed imports, alleging that they contained pests. The Chinese government only lifted that import block after Ottawa allowed the executive, Meng Wanzhou, to return home.
And a strategy of alleging that U.S. goods are unsanitary — which is sometimes a legitimate complaint — can be arduous to reverse.
“You don’t want to see health and safety turned into political bargaining,” said Darci Vetter, who was chief agricultural negotiator in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative in the Obama administration. “It turns carefully considered barriers based on science into a political issue.”
But it’s a tried-and-true tactic for Beijing, according to specialists in trade regulation mechanisms.
“This is what China does — trade action masquerading as legit public policy based on science,” said Marc Busch, who has advised both USTR and the Commerce Department on technical trade barriers and is now a professor of international business diplomacy at Georgetown University. Such technical trade barriers give Beijing “two bangs for the buck — plausible deniability and lethality,” Busch added.
The U.S. itself is no stranger to using nontariff barriers to protect its agricultural commodities, said Colin Carter, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis.
“One of the most egregious examples, if we look in the mirror, is U.S. sugar policy,” he said, referencing the virtual ban on sugar imports, a policy that has led to much higher domestic sugar prices.
But Trump’s latest offensive brings a sense of déjà vu to the U.S. natural gas industry, which was also caught in the trade war crossfire during Trump’s first term. China, then as now, stopped imports of natural gas as “a calculated strategic move,” said Leslie Palti-Guzman, energy security and climate change analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“Since the last U.S.-China trade war, China has deliberately positioned its LNG market as a geopolitical lever, preparing to weaponize it if relations with Washington soured again. That moment has arrived,” said Palti-Guzman, noting that Beijing is targeting an industry that is especially cozy with Trump.
This also isn’t the first time China has targeted the U.S. beef industry, a key political constituency that doesn’t rely on the Chinese market as heavily as, say, the soybean sector. While the U.S. is a net importer of beef, China is a key buyer of American beef and related commodities. China’s reticence to renew export licenses has stopped more than 90 percent of U.S. beef exports.
National Chicken Council spokesperson Tom Super said China has relied on nontariff barriers “for years,” calling the Chinese sanitary and phytosanitary concerns about U.S. chicken imports “bologna.”
“The antibiotic cited by Beijing has been banned in U.S. chicken production for decades,” Super added, referencing the drug furacilin, which is banned in the U.S. but China says it found repeatedly in shipments from Mountaire Farms.
China also quietly stopped importing U.S. natural gas, according to data from commodity analyst firm Kpler. The country so far this year has imported just one cargo of gas, compared to 14 cargoes during the same period of 2024, according to Kpler data.
Beijing put a 10 percent tariff on imports of U.S. gas in February. It has also made it clear that bringing U.S. gas into ports was politically frowned upon given the growing trade war with the Trump White House, according to a U.S. industry official granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about trade flows. However, compared with agricultural goods, the hit may be more modest to LNG exporters because the industry expects to find other buyers as global gas demand remains strong.
The move “candidly, was expected” from the offset of Trump’s trade war, said one LNG company executive via text who was granted anonymity to address the issue. “But there are deals to be cut elsewhere on LNG, IMO.”
A potentially bigger problem is Beijing’s decision to restrict its exports of critical minerals to the United States. That move hits makers of U.S. clean energy and petrochemicals, making it more difficult to produce everything from electric vehicle car batteries to the plastic used for picnic cutlery. China is by far the largest source of such minerals, leaving the United States with little alternative for supply.
The U.S. petrochemical industry, which has generally supported Trump, “has a big target on its back” with China’s critical mineral restrictions, Al Greenwood, deputy editor at commodities trade publication ICIS said in an interview.
Even if the current sky-high U.S.-China trade tensions ease, don’t expect Beijing to abandon nontariff barriers anytime soon.
“These nontariff measures allow China to maintain that veneer of, ‘We’re just following the rules — we have legitimate reasons to do these things,’” said Greta Peisch, former general counsel of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and currently a partner at Wiley Rein.
“It’s part of China’s narrative, and it should be of concern,” Peisch added.