NIGERIA'S POLITICS IS ONLY BEEF BEEF!

China says it will respond to any new trade tariffs by the United States with measures of the same scale and intensity.

The warning from China's ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai, came after Beijing slapped tariffs on $3 billion worth of US exports including fruit, pork and steel pipes.

Those measures were in response to President Donald Trump's tariffs on steel and aluminumfrom China and other countries. But Trump has also announced plans to impose tariffs on about $50 billion worth of Chinese goods.

The flurry of tariffs and threats has fueled fears that the damage to trade between the world's two largest economies could get worse.

The new US measures are still taking shape. The Trump administration hasn't yet announced which specific Chinese products will be hit and is planning to take public comments for a period of weeks before putting the tariffs into effect.

When that happens, "we will certainly take countermeasures of the same proportion and of the same scale, same intensity," Cui said in an interview with China's state-run English news channel CGTN that aired Tuesday in Asia.

Trump's plan to impose tariffs on around $50 billion of Chinese goods follows a US government investigation into alleged Chinese theft of intellectual property from American companies. The probe estimated the problem costs the US economy hundreds of billions of dollars every year.