China’s annual legislative meetings take on the Trump economic wrecking ball

(Originally published March 5 in “What in the World“) China’s legislators have gathered in Beijing to begin their yearly week of rubber-stamping today, and boy are their arms rubbery.

This year’s plenary of the National People’s Congress and of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference—known in China as the “two sessions”—takes place amid continued concerns about how Trump’s tariffs will hit an economy already struggling with deflation. This year’s confab will have the additional significance of coming at the end of the latest five-year economic planning period. So, all eyes will be on what the Communist Party’s priorities will be for 2026-2030. The work plan submitted to the NPC has already set another 5% target for GDP growth in 2025.

Beijing claimed China’s economy miraculously achieved its 5% target last year, despite a second consecutive year of falling prices in 2024. With China’s property and construction sector still nursing a debt-driven hangover and consumers afraid to spend, growth has depended more than usual on exports of cheap, manufactured goods. Trump’s tariffs threaten to knock that last leg of growth out from under it.

Tariffs are only part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to punish China, though. He also plans revoke the de minimis rule on tariffs, which exempted very small shipments from tariffs. That threatens China’s SMEs, a potent engine of economic growth. Small Chinese companies are particularly reliant on exports. And Trump is still warming up an executive order to impose levies on Chinese-built ships arriving in U.S. ports as well as ships in fleets that own them. That plan reportedly also includes levying any imported Chinese cranes.

Beijing retaliated against Trump’s latest 10% tariff on its exports to the U.S. by imposing a 15% tariff on imports of American chicken, corn, cotton, and wheat, and a 10% tariff on U.S. beef, dairy, fruit, pork, seafood, sorghum, soybeans, and vegetables. The U.S. is China’s second-largest source of food after Brazil, supplying roughly $41 billion, or 21%, of its overall food imports. But China is the largest importer of U.S. agricultural products, well ahead of Canada and Mexico.