Nearly nine years after President Donald Trump flew out of Beijing declaring he had secured “fantastic” commercial arrangements worth $250 billion, the United States and China still have no comprehensive trade agreement. What they do have is a tariff wall. American companies importing Chinese goods now pay an average duty of 47.5 percent, according to trade-weighted data published by the World Trade Organization for 2024, the most recent year available. Before the trade conflict began, that average hovered around 3 percent. And with additional levies imposed in 2025, the effective rate as of mid-2026 is almost certainly higher.
The Beijing trip produced headlines, not a trade pact
The White House summary of Trump’s November 2017 state visit lists the $250 billion figure as the combined value of trade and investment deals signed by companies from both countries. The documents include corporate contracts, joint-venture agreements, and memoranda of understanding. Absent from the package: any negotiated tariff reduction, market-access guarantee, or government-to-government trade framework.
Trump’s own remarks alongside President Xi Jinping struck an optimistic tone, emphasizing corporate dealmaking and the potential for deeper cooperation. But contemporaneous reporting from Reuters and The New York Times noted that the $250 billion headline appeared to bundle previously planned Boeing aircraft orders, energy contracts that had not been finalized, and non-binding memoranda that might never convert into actual shipments. No itemized breakdown was ever released, and no independent accounting has reconciled the announced total with verified commercial flows.
How tariffs climbed from 3% to 47.5%
The escalation was already in motion before Trump boarded the plane to Beijing. On August 14, 2017, he signed an executive memorandum directing the Office of the United States Trade Representative to open a Section 301 investigation into China’s technology-transfer and intellectual-property practices. A public hearing followed in October, and a formal report landed on March 22, 2018, triggering the first round of proposed tariffs.
From there, duties piled up fast. The USTR imposed them in successive tranches throughout 2018 and 2019, eventually covering more than $300 billion worth of Chinese imports. The largest single action, known as List 3, hit roughly $200 billion in goods at rates that started at 10 percent and were later raised to 25 percent. Each tranche was written into the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, making the surcharges a routine cost of doing business for thousands of American importers.
The only formal bilateral text to emerge from the entire conflict was the Phase One agreement, signed on January 15, 2020, more than two years after the Beijing trip. Phase One committed China to purchasing an additional $200 billion in American agricultural products, energy, manufactured goods, and services over 2020 and 2021. It also included provisions on intellectual-property enforcement and currency practices. Critically, it left the Section 301 tariff architecture almost entirely intact. The deal functioned as a partial ceasefire, not a rollback.
China fell well short of those purchase commitments. Tracking by the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that by the end of 2021, Chinese purchases of covered goods reached only about 57 percent of the agreed targets. Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute who maintained the tracker, described the outcome as “a deal that was never realistic to begin with” and noted that the shortfall removed whatever political incentive existed to ease tariffs in return.
The tariffs outlasted the administration that created them
When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, many trade analysts expected at least a partial unwinding. Instead, the Biden administration kept every Section 301 duty in place. In May 2024, after completing a mandatory four-year statutory review, it announced new or increased tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (100 percent), semiconductors (50 percent), lithium-ion batteries (25 percent), solar cells (50 percent), steel, aluminum, and certain medical products. The review concluded that China’s trade practices in those sectors continued to warrant protective measures.
By the time Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, the tariff structure he had originally built had been reinforced, not dismantled. His second administration then layered on further levies, including a 20 percent surcharge tied to fentanyl-related enforcement actions signed in early 2025. The cumulative result is the 47.5 percent trade-weighted average recorded by the WTO from 2024 data. Because the most recent rounds of increases are not yet reflected in that figure, the actual rate American importers face in mid-2026 is likely higher still.
Beijing has responded in kind. Chinese retaliatory tariffs on American goods have escalated in parallel, reaching rates as high as 125 percent on certain U.S. agricultural and industrial products. The result is a two-way tariff regime that has reshaped trade flows in both directions.
Why the 47.5% number is harder to interpret than it looks
Trade-weighted averages are useful shorthand, but they shift even when no new tariff legislation is enacted. The calculation depends on the mix of products actually crossing the border in a given year. If American buyers stop importing low-tariff Chinese goods and concentrate purchases in categories facing steeper Section 301 duties, the average rate rises on its own. The reverse is also true: companies that successfully shift sourcing to Vietnam, India, or Mexico can pull the weighted average down without any change in U.S. law.
The WTO’s published figure does not fully disaggregate which sectors are driving the elevated rate, making it difficult to say precisely how much of the 47.5 percent falls on consumer electronics versus industrial machinery versus raw materials. That opacity matters because the burden is not evenly distributed. A retailer importing finished consumer goods may face a very different effective rate than a manufacturer importing components for assembly in the United States.
Who absorbs the cost
Tariffs are paid at the border by the importer of record, not by the foreign exporter. From there, the cost fans out. Some importers have absorbed higher landed costs through thinner margins. Others have passed increases to customers, contributing to price pressures on goods ranging from power tools to furniture to consumer electronics. A third group has restructured supply chains entirely, relocating production to Southeast Asia or Mexico to sidestep the duties.
Domestic manufacturers in sectors like steel and solar panels have argued that the tariffs provide necessary protection against subsidized Chinese competitors. But companies further down the supply chain, those that buy Chinese steel or components as inputs, counter that elevated costs erode their ability to compete globally. Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the cost of the tariffs fell, in the words of the study’s authors, “almost entirely on U.S. firms and consumers” rather than on Chinese exporters, though the distributional effects vary widely by industry.
Neither Washington nor Beijing is moving toward a rollback
The gap between the optimism of that November 2017 trip and the trade relationship that exists as of mid-2026 is stark. The “fantastic” deals never produced a comprehensive agreement. The tariffs that followed have only grown. And the 47.5 percent average, already a record for the modern U.S.-China relationship, may not yet have peaked. Neither Washington nor Beijing has signaled any willingness to negotiate a broad reduction, leaving American importers, manufacturers, and consumers to navigate a tariff regime that has become a permanent feature of commerce between the world’s two largest economies.
