President-elect Donald Trump. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri A Chinese state-run newspaper says "US auto and iPhone sales in China will suffer a setback" if President-elect Donald Trump starts a trade war, The Guardian reported Monday.

If Trump acts on his threats to impose a 45% tariff on Chinese imports and officially list China as a currency manipulator, China will take a "tit-for-tat approach," the newspaper, Global Times, said.

The airline industry was singled out in the list of countermeasures — specifically that China would replace a batch of orders for US-owned Boeing airplanes with French-owned Airbus ones.

It also said US soybean and maize imports would be halted and China could limit the number of Chinese students studying in the US.

But the newspaper also described the 45% tariff as "merely campaign rhetoric."

Whether the president-elect will deliver on his protectionist ideas has previously been called into question. Societe Generale's China specialist, Wei Yao, believes a high tariff is out of the question, and the Barclays economic research team's base-case scenario is a 15% tariff on trade with China.

While the newspaper said "none of the previous presidents were bold enough to launch an all-out trade war on China" — mentioning China's retaliation to President Barack Obama's 35% import tariff on Chinese tires — it made China's likely response to Trump's threats clear, saying: "The new president will be condemned for his recklessness, ignorance, and incompetence and bear all the consequences."