Oct. 14 (UPI) -- The Trump administration recently began charging fees for Chinese ships docking at U.S. ports, prompting China to retaliate.
The move, which has been long planned, is intended to correct the imbalance between American and Chinese shipbuilding businesses. The U.S. shipbuilding business has dwindled over the years as China has become dominant.
On Friday, China vowed reciprocal fees on American-made ships in its ports.
"This is symbolic -- less than 1% of U.S. vessels docking in China annually are U.S.-flagged vessels, so the reality is this basically has no real impact," Cameron Johnson, a senior partner at Shanghai-based supply chain consultancy Tidalwave Solutions, told Politico. "But it signals that Beijing will match every single effort the United States targets against China -- if the U.S. sanctions a Chinese company, they're going to sanction a U.S. company. If we impose export controls on technology, they're going to do export controls on technology. We have just now escalated to a whole new level of trade warfare that nobody was expecting."
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