I'm an arm-chair economist but here's my take on it. Trade is like water: it takes the path of least resistance. These tariffs aren't aimed at hitting China, t

I'm an arm-chair economist but here's my take on it. Trade is like water: it takes the path of least resistance. These tariffs aren't aimed at hitting China, they're aimed at preventing the steel that China used to sell to the US instead being sold to Canada, crashing Canada's market of steel. Essentially, if China can't sell the steel directly to the US, they'll price it such that Canadian (in this example) steel consumers purchase it instead. Then, Canadian steel producers wind up getting punished by the US tariff on Chinese steel, because their prices are driven down due to the flood of excess product. The WTO allows this as an exclusion to the 'most favoured nation' rules of the GATT, specifically under the anti-dumping agreements [1]. That is, whilst normally a country must present the same tariff on a given product to all other countries in the world (it cannot favour or punish any particular nation), if the nation believes it is going to suffer the effects of dumping from a particular market then it is entitled to raise tariffs equivalent against that specific market to protect against that. This whole response to Chinese steel is largely due to their significant oversupply. They really rapidly expanded their steel production well above global requirements when they entered the WTO, well above what global demand dictated. In 2000, the worldwide industry was about 800 MT. Today, China alone does more than that and accounts for a full half of total worldwide production. As a result, Western steel production has buckled under crashing prices [2]. My take is that these actions are therefore largely politically protectionist in nature. They're aimed at protecting domestic industries rather than punishing China for any human rights issues. I highly doubt that this will cause the CCP to approach their human rights differently. Instead, I suspect they will redirect their attention to some other labour-intensive industry and try to gobble that up, as it will be their best way to offset the significant job losses that'll come from a cooling Chinese steel market. Specifically for the HN crowd, I think this will be the tech industry, as China talks about wanting to move up the tech chain - see their "Made in China 2025" policy [3]. If you are interested in this stuff, there's a very good podcast called "Trade Talks" [4] which discusses precisely this - the economics of global trade. Several episodes are about the US tariffs and their likely effects. They look back to previous examples, not just from the Great Depression but also more recently agricultural tariffs and how they affected South American exporters for example. I would highly encourage anyone who is interested in this topic to listen to at least a few of the episodes about tariffs. Yeh, I've cited Wikipedia. It's late and I'm lazy [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#Anti-dumping_actions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#Anti-... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 [4]: https://twitter.com/trade__talks https://twitter.com/trade__talks