President Donald Trump and his administration are behaving "like a gang of hoodlums," Chinese state media said Thursday, just hours before tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese goods were set to go into effect.
In a blistering editorial in China Daily, the English-language newspaper run by the Chinese government accused the United States of "blackmail" and "racketeering," and said "its unruliness looks set to have a profoundly damaging impact on the global economic landscape in the coming decades, unless countries stand together to oppose it."
"While the objective of the Donald Trump administration's protectionism is to reverse the relative economic decline of the US and benefit selected domestic industries and workers in the US, it will not achieve those aims," the paper wrote. "Instead, the effect will be rising prices in the US, which in turn will affect the balance sheets of many US companies operating in China, since they account for a large proportion of China's exports to the US."
Chinese officials have promised to retaliate against Trump's tariffs on Chinese imports. The editorial echoes comments made by Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesman Gao Feng Thursday. "The U.S. is opening fire on the entire world, including itself," Gao said at a weekly news conference.