President Donald Trump is moving toward imposing an additional 7.5% tariff on China, targeting what the administration characterises as the deliberate flooding of global markets with underpriced goods. Three people familiar with internal deliberations told the Associated Press that the proposal is under active consideration, though no final decision has been made.
The prospective duty would sit on top of the 12.5% forced-labour tariff already applied to Chinese goods as of late July 2026, making it part of a broader, sequential effort to rebuild the sweeping tariff wall that the Supreme Court dismantled earlier this year.
Administration officials believe a 7.5% rate is calibrated carefully enough to preserve a one-year US-China trade truce and to avoid disrupting a planned meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, expected in late September. Whether that summit will take place as anticipated remains unknown.
To understand the current moment, it helps to trace the sequence of events that produced it. Trump's tariff campaign began in earnest in March 2025, when his administration imposed 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico and additional levies on Chinese goods, citing each country's failure to stem flows of fentanyl into the United States. A 20% tariff on Chinese imports at that stage covered electronics including smartphones, laptops, and game consoles, according to Reuters.
The administration subsequently pursued broader ambitions, seeking to impose sweeping reciprocal duties of between 10% and 50% on most of the world's trading nations under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The Supreme Court struck those duties down in February 2026.
Trump responded swiftly. He signed executive orders imposing a temporary 10% global tariff for 150 days under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, buying time to rebuild legal pressure through other statutory routes. Simultaneously, the administration launched new trade investigations, Reuters reported.
In March 2026, two formal probes were opened. One targeted excess industrial capacity in 16 trading partners under Section 301 of the Trade Act. The other examined forced-labour practices covering approximately 60 countries. Both were designed to generate the legal foundation for fresh tariffs, Reuters reported at the time.
On 24 July 2026, the 150-day temporary tariff expired. The administration replaced it the same day with new forced-labour duties of 10% and 12.5% applied to goods from 60 trading partners, among them the European Union, China, Japan, and South Korea. The duties cover 99.4% of US imports, Reuters reported. China falls under the higher, 12.5% band.
Several categories are exempt from those forced-labour tariffs. They include oil and gas, fertiliser, certain foodstuffs, aircraft and parts, critical minerals, and goods already subject to Section 232 national security tariffs, such as automobiles, steel, aluminium, and copper.
The prospective 7.5% China-specific tariff, framed around excess industrial capacity rather than forced labour, would represent the next phase of this rebuilding effort. The precise legal authority the administration intends to invoke has not been publicly confirmed. The full range of products it would cover is also unknown, as is whether China or other affected partners would retaliate.
What is clear is the underlying logic: having lost its broadest instrument in the courts, the administration is assembling a layered tariff structure from authorities it regards as legally durable, advancing the work one statute and one investigation at a time.
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