The bulk of our exports to China are raw materials. Any prolonged trade war between the world's 2 most significant economies may impact these sectors badly if overall demand is reduced.
Gainers? The tariffs may benefit some agricultural commodity exports to China by providing a price advantage over US alternatives. However with a dry summer predicted I don't think anyone will be crowing.
Compliance issues: Trump does not get it that most manufactured products have multiple global inputs and it is often impossible to accurately assign country of origin percentages to most of it.
A concept may be developed in the UK, teams in Mumbai and Sydney may fine tune it, IP rights may then be partially sold to a US company, off the shelf bits and pieces may be sourced from Mexico, Taiwan and China, final assembly happens in China and Vietnam from where it is sent to multiple points for badging, packaging and distribution to wholesalers including on-line distributers all over the place. 10% of the cost may relate to specific in-country advertising campaigns. The whole bi-lateral tariff idea is a f8%&n nonsense.
It will be very easy for Chinese manufacturers to ship key (completed) parts for say a mobile phone to Vietnam or Indonesia where the screen and back can be clicked on and some badging applied for export to the US. Where did the phone come from? Maybe a dozen countries were involved in the development and manufacture of the hardware and software so who would know?
