Editorial: The economic war between the U.S. and China is causing pain in Chicago's Chinatown and beyond

Chicago Tribune

11-05-2025

President Donald Trump is beginning to understand that nosebleed tariffs on goods imported from China aren't sustainable. Encouraging, at least.
Just before Trump administration representatives were to begin meeting Saturday in Switzerland with Chinese counterparts, the president suggested that 80% might be an appropriate tariff on China rather than the current 145%. That surely is too high as well, but at least we're headed in the right direction.
This bit of cautiously positive news came just after this board met with the genial Midwest consul general of China, Wang Baodong, and some of his staff and had a wide-ranging discussion, including on the tense state of affairs between the two countries, one these diplomats bemoan. What struck us after leaving the meeting at the Chinese Consulate General in River North was how the economic warfare waged by the highest levels of these two powerful countries affects ordinary folks trying to make a living and carry on the traditions of their culture in our city, a true melting pot if there ever was one.
The area around Chicago's Chinatown is the only Chinatown in the U.S. that is growing, the consul general told us. Between 2010 and 2020, Asian Americans were by far the fastest-growing ethnic group in Chicago, with their numbers rising by nearly a third in that span. Much of that influx was centered in Chinatown and nearby Bridgeport.
Many of those residents are first- or second-generation Chinese Americans, and they maintain close ties with relatives in China. It's a connection felt strongly in Chinatown itself, where small businesses depend heavily on trade with China. With the Trump administration having removed tariff exemptions for even small deliveries of goods, those business owners are scared and hoping cooler heads prevail.
So it is our fervent hope that the combative rhetoric that has emanated from the White House toward China not filter down to the day-to-day interactions of people going about their business. So far, we've seen no evidence of that, thankfully. And neither had the consul general when we asked him.
Still, folks have to make a living. In a global economy that will remain a fact of modern economic life no matter how fervently Trump wishes for a made-in-America past to be revived, the world's second-most-populous country (barely trailing India) can't long be the target of what effectively is a trade embargo. Traffic at some U.S. ports already has slowed dramatically. The Port of Los Angeles, the busiest such facility in the Western Hemisphere, reportedly saw its cargo traffic drop 35% last week compared with the same time a year ago. Such trends, if they persist, will hurt unionized port workers, rail employees and truck drivers, among many others. In other words, many Trump voters.
In an Oval Office press gathering Thursday, Trump was asked directly about port workers losing their jobs because of lack of trade. His response? Calling it a 'good thing and not a bad thing,' he said: 'That means we lose less money, you know? When I see that, that means we lose less money.'
Trump routinely interprets a negative balance of trade the U.S. has with another nation as equivalent to this country as a whole paying something when, of course, the only Americans paying for the administration's draconian trade barriers are consumers (in the form of higher prices) and workers (in the form of lost trade-related jobs).
There surely are legitimate grievances the U.S. has toward Chinese government behavior in the global marketplace. The complaints have run over the years from technology theft to uncompetitive dumping of commodities to inordinately high barriers making it difficult for U.S. companies to access the vast Chinese market.
Notably, President Joe Biden kept the Chinese tariffs imposed by Trump's first administration throughout Biden's presidency. Worries about Chinese trade practices have been — and continue to be — bipartisan.
We are pleased to see the beginnings of recognition from the administration that economic warfare of this magnitude is bad for most of the country even if favored by a few industries that are direct beneficiaries. Let's keep lowering the rhetorical temperature and allow for rational negotiations to open up the channels of fair trade — in both directions — rather than close them down.