Data shows how tariffs have affected China imports to the US
It’s hard to believe we’re almost two months out from President Trump’s April 2, 2025, “Liberation Day” tariff announcements, which plunged global trade into a chaotic tailspin. Now, a trade court has ruled most of the tariffs are illegal (though there may be some workarounds).
Let’s take a look back to see what all this looked like in the data.
Shortly after news of the tariff increases, we started to see the effect of the policy show up in trade data. At the end of April, the percent change for year-on-year shipping container bookings was plunging into the abyss, and we didn’t know where the bottom was.
Turns out the bottom was deeper than expected. The week of May 5, we found that bottom with a 61.5% drop from the year prior, according to data from shipping analytics firm Vizion.
A week later, the Trump administration announced a 90-day suspension of the steepest 145% tariffs in favor of a temporary 30% tariff on each others’ imported goods.
The pent-up demand fueled a burst in shipping container bookings from China to the US. The latest data point from the week of May 18, 2025, is a 28.4% increase in bookings year on year.
Ryan Petersen, CEO of shipping logistics firm Flexport confirmed this, noting that ocean freight from China and Vietnam were breaking records:
Flexport had the two biggest ocean freight booking weeks in company history in the two weeks since the tariffs on China were paused. 80% growth over the pre-tariff trend line. Not just China surging, Vietnam also setting records.
— Ryan Petersen (@typesfast) May 24, 2025
But all of this could change with one Truth Social post, like it did last week, when the EU was facing the prospect of 50% tariffs on goods imported to the US until Trump delayed those, too.
We’ll check back in a few weeks.
