President Donald Trump and his administration are behaving "like a gang of hoodlums," Chinese state media said Thursday, just hours before tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese goods were set to go into effect.

In a blistering editorial in China Daily, the English-language newspaper run by the Chinese government accused the United States of "blackmail" and "racketeering," and said "its unruliness looks set to have a profoundly damaging impact on the global economic landscape in the coming decades, unless countries stand together to oppose it."