The latest Chinese tariffs on U.S. goods are scheduled to take effect one minute into Thursday in China.

China and the United States have now taken a series of steps in just one week that until very recently would have been almost unimaginable. For nearly half a century after the death of Mao Zedong, the two countries seemed on a course toward ever greater economic integration. Some experts even referred to the partnership of China and America as “Chimerica.”

That partnership was occasionally cast in doubt during the trade war that Mr. Trump started in his first presidential term, but it survived. The two countries’ close trade ties have since gradually loosened. But their ties have been supplemented by a complex trading web that transfers Chinese components to countries like Vietnam and Mexico, where they are assembled into finished goods for shipment to the United States with little or no tariffs due.

The pair of steep tariff increases by each side in the past week have now driven duties to a level that is likely to halt shipments of many products between the two countries, particularly if the tariffs endure more than a few weeks. Prohibitively high tariffs could ripple extensively through supply chains for many goods that rely on factories often in China but sometimes in the United States as well.

Mr. Trump’s latest tariffs, which took effect on Wednesday, hit dozens of America’s trading partners, including many longtime allies, like European nations, South Korea and Japan.

His extra 84 percent in tariffs on imports from China are on top of the 20 percent in tariffs that Mr. Trump imposed in February and March. Beijing matched those with limited tariffs, on just American fossil fuels and agricultural goods. And all of these tariffs are in addition to the standard levies both countries charge on all imports.

China did not stop with imposing further tariffs. The Ministry of Commerce announced separately on Wednesday that it was putting export controls on 12 American companies and had added six more American companies to its list of “unreliable entities,” meaning they will be mostly barred from doing business in China or with Chinese companies.

Even before China announced its latest tariffs, the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China expressed concern that Beijing’s tariffs could interfere with the operations of foreign companies that have invested in China. Many of these companies rely on assembling products in China that have components imported from the United States, notably semiconductors, that may now be heavily taxed.

“For companies that are unable to source alternatives, this could also result in them having to move their production out of China altogether,” Jens Eskelund, the chamber’s president, said in a statement. But he added that foreign companies might be cautious now about moving factories out of China because the United States has also put tariffs on import from other countries that might be alternatives to China.

Claire Fu contributed reporting.

On Monday, the Indian stock market lost around $170 billion in value as its two biggest indexes plummeted, mirroring global markets that have swung wildly as investors game out the likelihood of a downturn. By Tuesday, the domestic market had rebounded, and many analysts were sanguine about India’s economic advantages in trade negotiations with the United States.

On Wednesday, though, India’s Sensex and Nifty 50 indexes were down again as a 27 percent tariff on Indian exports to the United States took effect. India’s central bank cut interest rates and reduced its growth forecast, citing the rapidly changing global landscape.

“The recent trade tariff-related measures have exacerbated uncertainties, clouding the economic outlook across regions, posing new headwinds for global growth and inflation,” Sanjay Malhotra, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, said in a speech.

Many everyday investors, especially first-timers, were lurching between confusion and terror, unsure whether to blame their trading strategies or Mr. Trump.

“Of course I’m worried,” said Gaurav Goyal, a 32-year-old entrepreneur who began investing about a year ago. “Nobody wants to see a red portfolio.”

Mr. Goyal said his stock holdings had fallen by 10 percent since Mr. Trump took office, and he was debating whether to keep trading stocks or buy safer assets like gold.

“The one and only Donald Trump,” he said, was to blame for the state of affairs.

Ordinary Indians have flocked into stocks as regulators and the financial services industry have made it easier to invest, with trading platforms advertising heavily, said Girish Kodashettar, a certified financial planner based in Bengaluru.

“A lot of awareness was created,” Mr. Kodashettar said.

The popularity of online trading accounts coincided with a steady rise in the Indian stock market, “meaning that new investors have only seen a one-way run,” said Pranjal Kamra, the founder and chief executive of Finology, a financial advisory firm. “They haven’t seen fluctuation or the market falling.”

Between March 2020, when the pandemic lockdowns began, and September 2024, the Nifty 50 stock index, made up of the 50 biggest Indian companies that trade on the National Stock Exchange, more than tripled in value. The index has since tailed off.

Mr. Kamra said he hadn’t heard about animosity toward the United States or Mr. Trump because of the wobbly market or Monday’s crash. But there is an overarching fear, he said. To pacify nervous investors, “I’d send an emoji that signifies calm and meditation to everyone panicking,” Mr. Kamra said. “A Buddha meditating!”

The market mayhem has produced moments of levity. Some internet users started using the term “Orange Monday,” a reference to the “Black Monday” crash of 1987 and to the hue of Mr. Trump’s skin. Others went with “Orange Is the New Black.”

Shubham Sachdeva, a 30-year-old chartered accountant whose stock holdings had fallen by 5 percent in recent days, said the United States was at the “epicenter” of a movement away from free trade. “Globalization, which integrated the world in the 1980s and 1990s for collective growth, now faces the opposite trend,” he said.

Some analysts and experienced investors took a more measured view, saying that short-term disturbances from the tariff negotiations were unlikely to impede India’s bigger growth story and, therefore, the market’s long-term trajectory.

“There is no need to blame anyone for the situation,” said Nilesh Shah, a managing director at Kotak Mahindra Asset Management. The United States is doing what Mr. Trump believes it needs to do to address trade imbalances, Mr. Shah said, and “India has to deal with the current situation to create a win-win situation by becoming the U.S.’s preferred partner.”

Plenty of people in India were still bullish. Rachana Ranade, a chartered accountant and finance educator with 5.2 million YouTube subscribers, said many investors saw the rout as an opportunity.

“Since yesterday, no one has asked me if this was the time to sell,” Ms. Ranade said on Tuesday. “They have all asked if this was a good time to add more.” A depressed market is ripe with opportunity, she said.

“Sentiment is not good right now,” Ms. Ranade said. “But the prices are good.”

The missive assailed the United States for preparing to impose additional 90 percent tariffs on May 2 on low-value parcels from China, which enter the United States with no customs inspection and no duties paid. The value of these so-called de minimis shipments has soared more than tenfold in recent years, exceeding $60 billion last year.

There were a few unexpected conciliatory notes in the Chinese statement. “As two major countries at different stages of development with distinct economic systems, it is natural for China and the U.S. to have differences and frictions in their economic and trade cooperation,” it said.

The report, issued by the State Council Information Office, criticized the United States for having considerably tightened export controls on the transfer to China of technologies with both civilian and military applications. The office suggested that this was a violation of the spirit of the so-called Phase One agreement reached in 2020.

It said that China had abided by the pact, which also called for China to increase its purchases of American energy, agricultural products and manufactured goods, such as aircraft from Boeing, the American aerospace giant.

“The Chinese side upheld the spirit of contract and endeavored to overcome multiple adverse factors, including the unexpected impact of the pandemic, subsequent supply chain disruptions, and global economic recession, to ensure implementation of the agreement,” the report said.

China cited production delays by Boeing during the pandemic as reasons for not fulfilling that part of the pact.

While Boeing has had delays, Chinese government-controlled airlines have refused to accept delivery of dozens of previously ordered planes for six years. At the same time, a heavily subsidized state-owned manufacturer, the Shanghai-based Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, is racing to make its own single-aisle passenger planes.

The commentary praised de minimis shipments as giving greater choice to consumers and helping small businesses to compete. Large Chinese e-commerce sites like Shein and Temu have expanded their shipments from factories in China straight to American households.

The document noted that China allows de minimis shipments of parcels through delivery services. But in practice, China allows a far narrower exemption from tariffs than the $800 under the U.S. de minimis rules, limiting the value of many exempted parcels to $27.

The document also did not mention that Congress raised the American de minimis limit to $800 in 2016, from $200 previously, kicking off a huge surge in such shipments across the Pacific from China and fueling a boom for Chinese e-commerce companies.

Yields are still generally lower than when Mr. Trump was inaugurated, but a sustained sell-off of Treasuries would erase the key difference between the global market response to Mr. Trump’s tariffs and Ms. Truss’s tax cuts. In the immediate aftermath of the president’s tariff announcement, bond yields actually drifted down, even as the stock market plummeted and dollar weakened. This partly reflected expectations for slowing growth, but also served as a reminder of the traditional status of the American bond market as a haven for investors.

Now, that safe-haven status may be crumbling, according to some analysts. At the extreme, that could raise pressure on the Federal Reserve to intervene, which is what the Bank of England did in 2022 to shore up the British bond market.

In Britain’s case, those dramatic events forced Ms. Truss to rescind her proposed tax cuts, and the market chaos subsided. But Ms. Truss’s credibility was destroyed, and she was forced to step down after 44 days in office. Mr. Trump, by contrast, has shown no sign that he plans to reverse the tariffs, and for now, there appear to be few political levers to force his hand.

That was underscored on Wednesday when China announced an additional 50 percent tariff on U.S. goods, matching new American levies that had taken effect hours earlier. China also struck at American companies, imposing export controls on a dozen of them and adding six others to a list of “unreliable entities,” preventing them from doing business in China.

China’s new tariffs, which will take effect on Thursday, mean all American goods shipped to China will face an additional 85 percent import tax. The minimum U.S. tax on Chinese imports is now 104 percent. Both figures would have been unimaginable a few weeks ago.

With China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, and Mr. Trump locked in a game of chicken — each unwilling to risk looking weak by making a concession — the trade fight could spiral even further out of control, inflaming tensions over other areas of competition like technology and the fate of Taiwan, the self-governing island claimed by Beijing.

Mr. Trump’s bare-knuckle tactics make him a singular force in U.S. politics. But in Mr. Xi, he faces a hardened opponent who survived the turmoil of China’s late-20th-century political purges, and who views the United States’ competitive tactics as ultimately aimed at subverting the ruling Communist Party’s legitimacy.

“Trump has never gone into a back-alley brawl where the other side is willing to brawl and use the same kind of tactics as him,” said Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “For China, this is about their sovereignty. This is about the Communist Party’s hold on power. For Trump, it might just be a political campaign.”

China’s economy, which was already in a vulnerable state because of a property crisis, now faces the specter of a global recession and a devastating slowdown in trade, its defining industry and main driver of growth. In a sign of Beijing’s growing unease, Chinese censors appeared to be blocking social media searches of hashtags that referred to the number 104, as in the size of the American tariffs.

“This is a huge shock to the China-U.S. economic relationship, like an earthquake,” Wu Xinbo, the dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, said of the tariffs imposed on Wednesday. “It remains to be seen if this is temporary turmoil or a long-term unavoidable trend.”

To be sure, a U.S.-China decoupling is still far from becoming reality. Chinese and American companies like TikTok and Starbucks are both still entrenched in each other’s countries. And Chinese banks remain hitched to the U.S. dollar-dominated financial system.

China and the United States are still at the brinkmanship stage, Mr. Kennedy said, each trying to force the other to offer a deal on bended knee. But the spat could become more dangerous if the Trump administration goes after Chinese financial institutions — for instance, by rescinding the licenses of Chinese banks in the United States or booting them off the international payments system Swift.

In pushing back against Mr. Trump’s moves, Beijing has cast itself as a victim of unfair American trade practices and protectionism. The irony is that China has done the same, if not worse, over the decades by limiting foreign investment and subsidizing Chinese firms.

Mr. Xi himself has made no direct comment about the latest U.S. tariffs. On Wednesday afternoon, though, shortly after they took effect, Chinese state media announced that he gave a speech in a meeting with the other six members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the apex of power in China, as well as other top officials. In it, Mr. Xi called on officials to bolster ties with China’s neighbors and “strengthen industrial and supply chain cooperation.”

A spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, Lin Jian, did address the new tariffs, saying on Wednesday that China would “never accept such arrogant and bullying behavior” and would “definitely retaliate.” The new tariffs were announced hours later.

Any fracture between the Chinese and American economies will be felt across the world. Business was the bedrock of the bilateral relationship for nearly five decades. Without it, their engagement on other global issues, like security, climate change and future pandemics and financial crises, would likely stall.

China has tried to downplay its vulnerability to the economic chaos unleashed by the Trump administration. It says it has reduced its reliance on U.S. markets for its exports and that its economy is getting more self-sufficient, especially when it comes to developing homegrown technologies.

But that papers over serious problems in the Chinese economy, which has been largely stagnant because of a collapse in the property market. Moreover, Mr. Trump’s assault on the global trading system, which includes targeting countries like Vietnam where Chinese companies had opened factories to circumvent earlier U.S. tariffs, strikes at the core of one of China’s only current economic bright spots.

The fallout from the trade disruption will hurt the United States, which relies on China for all sorts of manufactured goods, but will do more damage to China, said Wang Yuesheng, the director of the Institute of International Economics at Peking University.

“The impact on China is mainly that Chinese products have nowhere to go,” Mr. Wang said. That will ravage export-oriented companies making things like furniture, clothing, toys and home appliances along China’s eastern seaboard, which largely exist to serve American consumers.

“These companies will be hit very hard,” Mr. Wang said.

The threat to China’s exports compounds the challenging task of bringing back foreign investment, which has undergone an exodus since the Covid pandemic and the introduction of strict national security laws that made doing business in China increasingly difficult.

Mr. Xi has tried to woo foreign investors back, hosting a group of executives from overseas last month in Beijing. In a speech, he said China’s development was owed not only to the leadership of the Communist Party, but to the “support and help of the international community, including the contributions made by foreign-funded enterprises in China.”

Beijing’s strategy now is to push back at the United States and hope that Mr. Trump succumbs to domestic pressure to reverse course, said Evan Medeiros, a professor of Asian studies at Georgetown University who served as an Asia adviser to President Barack Obama.

“They know that if they give in to pressure they will get more pressure,” he said. “They will resist it with the belief that China can withstand more pain than they can.”

Until then, China’s leaders appear to be girding the country for a protracted fight. One sign: Influential bloggers have been allowed to weigh in on the crisis and suggest other ways to retaliate against the United States.

One of them, Ren Yi, a Harvard-educated Chinese blogger who goes by the pen name “Chairman Rabbit,” listed six potential countermeasures, including restrictions in China on U.S. service businesses like law firms and consultancy companies; cutting imports of American poultry and soybeans; and ending cooperation with Washington on reducing the flow of fentanyl into the United States.

“The trade war,” he wrote, “is not simply an economic friction but a ‘war without smoke.’ This must be understood from that perspective.”

Vivian Wang contributed reporting from Beijing and Keith Bradsher from Guangzhou, China. Claire Fu contributed research from Seoul and Siyi Zhao from Beijing.

The final list is expected to exclude bourbon, for instance, after Mr. Trump threatened to place a 200 percent tariff on all European alcohol in response to its inclusion. That would have been a crushing blow for wine producers in France, Italy and Spain.

“We are not in a business of going, let’s say, cent for cent, or tit for tat, or dollar for dollar,” Maros Sefcovic, the bloc’s trade commissioner, said this week.

Since last month, the United States has introduced tariffs of 25 percent on steel, aluminum and cars, and broad 20 percent on everything else coming from Europe — and those broad-based tariffs took effect on Wednesday. European Union officials have said they would prefer to negotiate to get rid of those higher levies, and have even offered to cut tariffs to zero on cars and other industrial products if the United States does the same.

But with serious negotiations slow to materialize, Europe is striking back in a staggered way. The retaliatory tariffs up for a vote on Wednesday would be a first step, in response only to steel and aluminum levies.

E.U. officials are expected to announce the next step, a plan to hit back at both the car levies and the 20 percent tariffs, as soon as early next week. Much as with the steel and aluminum retaliation, they plan to lay out the suggested contours of the response, then consult with member states, which will then vote on whether to go ahead.

The officials have insisted that all options are on the table, which means that further measures could follow.

For instance, some national officials have suggested that Europe should use a new trade weapon that is often referred to as the European Union’ s “bazooka” to hit American service companies, including big tech firms like Google.

Those measures have not been tried before, but they would potentially give Brussels a more powerful negotiating position: Europe buys more services from America than it sells. Europeans are critical to technology giants’ bottom lines.

Yet whether such an aggressive services retaliation will actually happen is still unclear. It would be difficult to design in a way that would not cost Europeans — who have come to rely on services like Google search and American cloud technology — and different European capitals have different appetites for retaliation.

For now, the goal is to slowly and deliberately roll out a response, hoping that Europe’s huge consumer market and significant economic might will be enough to prod Washington closer to working out a solution.

“Europe is always ready for a good deal,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the E.U.’s executive branch, said this week. “But we are also prepared to respond through countermeasures and defend our interests.”

“There is a lot of uncertainty in Washington as far as who we talk to and which policymakers that we need to be in touch with,” Thomas Djiwandono, Indonesia’s deputy finance minister, said in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Tuesday. “Just to give everybody here a bit of color, that when you are talking to the U.S. Trade Representative, it might be different from talking to the Commerce Department.”

Mr. Thomas spoke on the sidelines of a summit of finance ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. His comments were reflective of the confusion, concern and quiet anxiety that clouded the gathering as the region grappled with the implications of Mr. Trump’s tariffs on its export-driven economies.

The annual meeting typically unfolds with little fanfare and attracts scant attention beyond policy circles. But this year, the new U.S. taxes on the region’s exports — which range from apparel to computer chips — has raised the stakes, leaving the region on the precipice of profound economic disruption.

“Rarely have we seen such stark exposure — so sudden, so destabilizing and so real,” Kao Kim Hourn, the ASEAN general-secretary, said in a speech on Wednesday.

The region has been hit with some of the heftiest of Mr. Trump’s tariffs. Cambodian imports are now subject to a 49 percent duty, while Vietnam is facing a rate of 46 percent and 32 percent was levied to Indonesia. Investors have reacted by pummeling stock markets across the region in recent days.

As Southeast Asian countries move to mitigate the effects of the levies, one thing is clear: Unlike China, they are not retaliating with their own tariffs.

Some, like Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia, have offered to reduce duties on U.S. imports and lift other trade restrictions. As the countries chart their own recourse, the bloc, chaired by Malaysia this year, is also expected to take a unified approach to the tariffs. Those discussions are scheduled for Thursday, the last day of the finance ministers’ meeting.

There was also a sense of quiet urgency at the gathering. Singapore’s second minister for finance, Chee Hong Tat, called on ASEAN countries to “speed things up” on regional trade initiatives.

Southeast Asia has emerged as an alternative to China’s manufacturing prowess in recent years. Many businesses moved their factories, or large chunks of production, to the region after Mr. Trump started a trade war with China in his first term. It remains unclear how the new tariffs will reverberate across the regions.

“Some companies that I have spoken to are looking to absorb half of the cost and pass on the other half to consumers and see what happens,” Benjamin Hung, Standard Chartered’s president for international operations, said in an interview during the event.

But the host of the summit projected calm. Malaysia, whose exports will be subject to a 24 percent tariff, is also planning talks in Washington.

“I am chill,” Amir Hamzah Azizan, Malaysia’s second finance minister, said on Tuesday.

Most investors do not share his sentiment. Malaysia’s main stock index is down about 8 percent in the past week.