China Section 301 tariffs — List 4B (never took effect)

List 4B was the scary half of the List 4 split: roughly $160 billion of Chinese goods including smartphones, laptop computers, video-game consoles and toys, scheduled to be hit with a 15% tariff on December 15, 2019. These are the products — think Apple iPhones and the holiday-shopping catalog — that the administration had spent two years trying to keep out of the tariff line of fire.

It never fired. On December 13, 2019, two days before the scheduled start, USTR announced it was suspending List 4B as part of the Phase One trade deal with China. On December 19, 2019, USTR formally confirmed the suspension in the Federal Register. Not a single shipment was ever assessed the List 4B duty.

That is why this entry is tagged rescinded rather than paused: it was abandoned as a concession in a negotiated deal, not temporarily frozen pending a restart. The product list itself stayed famous as the "if tariffs land on iPhones" scenario, and in the second term the administration did eventually move some of these same consumer-electronics categories into tariffs under different authorities.

For the record: as a standalone first-term action, List 4B was announced, scheduled, and then walked back before a single dollar was collected.

Directly: No one — the tariff never took effect

Ultimately: No one, for this specific action (though the underlying goods later attracted tariffs under other authorities in the second term)

The announced-but-canceled nature of List 4B is exactly why consumers did not see iPhone or laptop price spikes in December 2019.