California residents worried about potential impact of tariffs on employment, economy

China

California residents worried about potential impact of tariffs on employment, economy

2025-02-17 16:00 Last Updated At：23:17

Long Beach, a coastal city in the U.S. State of California, is bracing for challenges as its port economy will be affected by the series of executive orders signed and tariffs announced by President Donald Trump. An economic impact study has shown that one in five jobs in this city is related directly or indirectly to trade at its port.

"That's a lot of jobs for the city of Long Beach, and the study goes on and talks about, if I remember correctly, in southern California 575,000 jobs, in the state of California 700,000 some odd jobs are related to business at the port of Long Beach," said Bonnie Lowenthal, president of the Long Beach Board of Harbor Commissioners, at a local Chinese New Year celebration event on Saturday.

The latest flurry of tariffs announced by Trump aims to revive domestic manufacturing, but experts say it could take time to build capacity, especially for metals like steel and aluminum.

"At the minimum, it will be three to five years, if not longer for large industrial projects to materialize it. I think it's much easier for advanced manufacturing to be able to deploy right away within a couple of years' time, but under no way or form or shape, one can imagine that one will start to see the manufacturing boom in six months. It will not happen. It cannot happen," said Nick Vyas, founder and executive director of the USC Randall R. Kendrick Global Supply Chain Institute. Meanwhile, concerns are mounting that tariffs could bring much uncertainty to key industries, such as construction and auto-manufacturing, which rely on these raw materials.

"When you are running an industry where average car production, the parts, the subsystems, travels cross-border three and a half to four times before it actually gets assembled, and you introduce this kind of friction between cross-border supply chain, it creates a tremendous anxiety, tremendous inefficiency and tremendous friction. All of this adds up to less productive proposition, higher cost, lower margin, and that makes the entire industry nervous, and rightfully so," Vyas added.

Mary Barton, treasurer of the Long Beach-Qingdao Association, a non-profit organization established in 1985 to foster friendship and exchanges between Long Beach and China's coastal port city Qingdao, said these shifts may be felt by many more businesses and their workers.

"Our friends in the business world are worried about whether or not their products will be successful on the market now. And if not, with these new higher prices, will they be forced to lay off people? What will the economic price be for these people to pay who had nothing to do with the disputes?" said Barton.

China achieves large-scale births of cloned yaks

Chinese scientists announced Monday that they have achieved a breakthrough in yak cloning, with 10 cloned calves all naturally delivered in southwest China's Xizang Autonomous Region.

These calves, consisting of three black yaks and seven white ones, were born from March 25 to April 5 at a yak breeding and research base in Xizang's Damxung County, all meeting expected standards and steadily gaining weight.

The mass births came after the first cloned yak was born in July 2025, which has grown healthily and weighs about 183 kg now.

The achievement was made using a domestically developed breeding system that combines whole-genome selection with somatic cell cloning, following three years of research by a Chinese scientific team.

"Whole-genome selection can accurately pinpoint excellent genetic loci associated with large body size, fast growth, strong fecundity and disease resistance, high feed conversion efficiency, and tolerance to high-altitude and low-oxygen conditions (cold resistance). On this basis, somatic cell cloning enables 1:1 precise replication of the genotype through asexual rapid propagation (cloning), thereby compressing the breeding cycle to within five years," said Fang Shengguo, a professor at the College of Life Sciences at Zhejiang University and director of the State Conservation Center for Gene Resources of Endangered Wildlife.

Yak farming is one of the key industries targeted for development in Xizang during the country's 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-2030). Traditional yak breeding has relied on phenotype selection, a process that can take up to 20 years and often leads to declining genetic quality.

Researchers said the new method can shorten the breeding cycle to less than five years by accurately identifying desirable genetic traits such as faster growth, disease resistance, feed efficiency and adaptation to high-altitude, low-oxygen environments, while enabling rapid replication of elite breeding stock.

Experts added that the technology could also support conservation efforts for rare yak genetic resources, including the endangered golden wild yak, whose population in Xizang is estimated at more than 300.

So far, the research team has developed more than 200 cloned embryos of golden wild yaks and hybrid wild-blood yaks, laying the groundwork for future embryo transfer and species recovery programs.