China Section 301 tariffs — List 4A (scaled back)

List 4 was the consumer-facing tranche of the Section 301 China tariffs. After Lists 1–3 hit industrial goods, the administration turned to the everyday stuff — electronics, clothing, shoes, toys — that USTR had earlier tried to avoid. List 4A covered roughly $120 billion of Chinese imports and took effect at 15% on September 1, 2019.

That rate did not last. As part of the "Phase One" trade deal signed with China in January 2020, the U.S. halved the List 4A rate from 15% to 7.5%, effective February 14, 2020. That makes List 4A the cleanest example on this site of a tariff being explicitly scaled back rather than repealed: it stayed on the books and kept being collected, just at half the original rate.

The story does not end there. In the second term, the Trump administration layered additional Section 301 duties back on top of Chinese imports, so the effective rate on many List 4A goods rose again. But the 2019-to-2020 trajectory — 15% down to 7.5% — is why this entry is tagged scaled-back, and it remains the only one of the original four lists that was formally reduced rather than kept whole or canceled.

For shoppers: this is the round that put tariffs on phones, sneakers and toys, and the Phase One cut is why those prices didn't rise as much as feared in 2020.

Directly: U.S. importers of consumer goods from China

Ultimately: U.S. consumers, since List 4A is overwhelmingly finished retail products

Unlike the earlier lists, List 4A is nearly all consumer goods, so pass-through to retail prices is unusually direct.

Consumer-facing tariffs on List 4A goods were largely passed through to U.S. retail prices; the 15%→7.5% cut reduced but did not eliminate that burden

The cut to 7.5% was one of the few unilateral tariff reductions of the trade war.

Source: Tax Foundation — Trump tariffs analysis