Han Lin: animal enumerations show ‘how granular tariff codes can be’
China’s list enumerates 1,619 US product types — from butter, offal, lobster and foie gras to coal, MRI systems, rabbit hair and animals for breeding including donkeys, mules, horses, whales, dolphins and dugongs — as part of reciprocal lists worth about $30bn on each side. The US list names 77 categories of Chinese products including bed linen, garden umbrellas, toasters, fish hooks, billiard balls and artificial flowers.
The announcements are the latest step away from the intense trade war between the world’s two largest economies that dominated much of last year. Major strategic products are not included and no timeline has yet been given for the reductions.
Han Lin, the China country director at the Asia Group, a strategic advisory firm, told The Guardian that the animal enumeration is “certainly eye-catching: donkeys, mules, horses, whales, dolphins and dugongs.”
“But I’d read it less as an exotic trade story than as evidence of how granular tariff codes can be,” Han said.
Zhu Tian, a vice-president and co-dean at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai, described the cuts as “a positive step, but not a major breakthrough,” noting that the reductions covered a relatively small share of US-China trade and that other tariffs on more strategic goods remained in place.
“Still, it is significant that the two sides are moving from simply avoiding further escalation to actually reducing some tariffs,” Zhu added.
US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said each side had recommended $30bn of non-sensitive trade that “could benefit from more favourable tariff treatment in the future.” The list represented “improved market access for about 30% of US exports to China,” he added.
China’s commerce ministry said levies on more than 90% of the products would be subject to “most favoured nation” levels, according to state media.
Sensitive product categories such as semiconductors, batteries and electric vehicles are not covered in the $30bn tariff-cut lists. US whole soya beans imports — which became a Chinese target during 2025’s trade war — are not on Beijing’s tally, Reuters news agency noted, meaning they still face an additional tariff of 10%.
The agreement has been brokered through the US-China Board of Trade, set up during Trump’s visit to Beijing in May.
Han said both sides are “carving out non-sensitive trade where cooperation is still possible,” adding that “it’s managed stabilisation, not a trade reset.”
The list releases come days after Xi Jinping and Donald Trump met in Washington for what The Guardian described as an optics-driven summit aimed at stabilising the two sides’ volatile relationship. That meeting yielded only a two-month extension to a wider trade truce first established by the two leaders in Busan, South Korea, last year.