U.S. President Joe Biden's push to triple tariffs on Chinese steel imports strikes a mostly symbolic blow on an industry facing bigger concerns over faltering local demand and threats of even stronger blowback against China's surging exports. The state-backed China Metallurgical Industry Planning and Research Institute (MPI) forecasts a 1.7% drop in China's steel demand this year, following a 3.3% decline in 2023. While China's steel exports last year climbed more than a third to their highest since 2016 at 90.26 million metric tons, about 9% of its total crude steel output, just 598,000 tons of the shipments went to the United States.