Five arenas where the war actually landed

The signature battleground. Consumer goods — led by phones, computers and household electronics — remained the largest U.S. import category from China even at the 2025 trough: $141.9 billion (USAFacts, July 2026).

The April 2025 peak rates briefly made direct Chinese consumer-electronics imports prohibitively expensive, and the April 11 exemptions for smartphones and laptops showed how quickly policy bent toward Apple's supply chain. The deeper shift is supplier diversification: China's share of U.S. cell-phone imports fell to 45.2% by early 2026 — still first, but no longer dominant for the first time in two decades (Forbes, March 2026) — while India's phone exports to the U.S. jumped from $6.9 billion to $22.0 billion in 2025. Assembly lines did not so much leave China as grow around it.

American farm country paid the highest price of the tariff era. U.S. agricultural exports to China fell 62.7% year-over-year in 2025 — a $15.9 billion contraction (CSIS, May 2026).

Soybeans have been the emblematic cargo since 2018, when Beijing's first retaliation targeted them precisely because they targeted the farm belt. The Phase One deal of 2020 was built around purchase commitments that were never fully met; the 2025 escalation and China's tariff walls on U.S. chicken, pork, soybeans and beef did the rest, while Brazilian planters booked the displaced demand for a second decade running. The Busan agreement's soybean-purchase clause is, for U.S. farm-state politics, the single most watched line item in the truce.

Where tariffs gave way to controls. Since October 2022, the lever has been export licensing — chips, chipmaking tools, and since 2023, U.S. capital itself — rather than duty rates.

The Foreign Direct Product Rule of 2020 and the comprehensive controls of October 2022 and their 2023-24 updates aimed to freeze China's frontier AI and memory capability while U.S. firms lobbied to keep selling into the largest semiconductor market on earth. Beijing answered with rare-earth and gallium/germanium export licensing of its own, making minerals the counterweight to chips. The September 2026 agreement's bilateral AI dialogue is the first institutional channel touching this file.

China's strongest card and America's oldest lesson. The 2012 WTO rare-earths case foreshadowed 2025, when export licensing on rare earths and gallium became the counter-tariff that moved U.S. policy.

Rare-earth magnets, gallium, germanium, graphite: a handful of choke points where Chinese refining dominance exceeds 80% of global supply. The June 2025 London framework traded faster export licenses for paused chip-tool restrictions; the Busan agreement suspended China's newest controls for a year. LNG and crude oil, briefly tariffed by Beijing in early 2025, feed the other direction — energy remains the largest U.S. export category to China after farm goods and aircraft in normal years.

The smallest parcels caused the biggest administrative shock. The end of the $800 duty-free threshold for Chinese goods in May 2025 rewired trans-Pacific consumer logistics.

Section 321 "de minimis" entries had grown past a billion parcels a year, carrying direct-from-factory retail to American doorsteps tariff-free. Its elimination for China ended the pure-play model, pushed platforms toward U.S. warehousing and price increases, and handed customs agencies a packet-inspection workload measured in the hundreds of millions. Watch the carve-outs: exemptions for smartphones (April 2025) and the truce's covered-goods cuts both began life as de minimis workarounds.