Mr. Trump has said as much, and did so again at a news conference on Tuesday. “China has been taking advantage of the United States for a long time, and that’s not happening anymore,” he said.

The Chinese public could see any effort to soothe tensions as capitulation. Some hard-liners want a more aggressive stance.

Lou Jiwei, who retired as finance minister in 2016 but is still the head of the country’s social security fund, suggested on Sunday that China could deliberately disrupt American companies’ supply chains by halting the export of crucial components mostly made in China. But Chinese trade experts dismiss that idea as impractical and not the government’s position.

Chinese officials know what they don’t want to do. They have rejected one idea that would replace the matching tariffs with a more sophisticated system, said the people briefed on the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the fragility of the deliberations. That response — discussed in detail within the Commerce Ministry and other agencies — would have led to lower tariffs on American goods in dollar terms, which could be seen as a fig leaf to the White House.

That approach would have recognized a potentially expensive new reality for Beijing: The tariffs may be here to stay. Mr. Trump is suffering from weak approval ratings and could lose influence in congressional elections in November. Democrats have opposed most of his agenda, but many have supported his attacks on trade with China. Even if Mr. Trump leaves office in two years, there is little guarantee that his China trade policies will be changed.

In Beijing, proponents of the new approach, which would scale down China’s tariffs in dollar terms to reflect the lopsided trade imbalance between the two countries, say Chinese leaders could still revisit the idea because it offers them a way to contain the damage and soothe tensions.