China faces 60pc tariffs and Australia will feel their pain

The whopping impost on China – ‘tough love’, the American President called it during his Rose Garden performance – comes on top of the 20 per cent across-the-board tariffs his administration had already imposed on China.

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The first read of Donald Trump’s coloured tariff chart was shocking enough for China.

A banner headline on one of China’s most popular news websites caught the sense of disbelief. “Trump actually imposed a 34 per cent ‘reciprocal tariff’ on China,” it read.

It is actually even worse. The whopping impost on China – “tough love”, the American President called it during his Rose Garden performance – comes on top of the 20 per cent across-the-board tariffs his administration had already imposed on China in his first months back in office.

And those 20 per cent top tariffs built on earlier tariffs on China from Trump’s first administration, which were topped up during Joe Biden’s presidency.

All together, the cumulative American tariff rate on China will now be about 65 per cent. Unless there is a reprieve before their implementation next week, the extraordinary tariff levels Trump campaigned on will become a reality.

“I have great respect for President Xi [Jinping] of China, great respect for China,” Trump said in the Rose Garden. “But they were taking tremendous advantage.”

The economic relationship between the world’s two biggest economies will never be the same. Xi’s advisers have signalled it will soon counterpunch – and hard.

Investors are panicking. Shares in Apple, with its famously China-dependent supply chain and huge American customer base, fell 7 per cent.

Australia, another China-dependent entity, will feel the Chinese economic pain.

Brutal additional tariffs on Australia’s other biggest export partners – all key security partners – will compound the grief.

Japan has been whacked with a 24 per cent tariff, South Korea with a 25 per cent tariff, Taiwan with a 32 per cent tariff, and India with a 26 per cent tariff.

That is all very bad news for trade-focused Australia, even if Canberra was given a relative reprieve by Trump.

The Australian economy will shrug off a 10 per cent tariff on exports to America. But we can’t escape the roiling of our biggest trading partners by the world’s largest economy.