Dennis Muilenburg, chairman and CEO of Boeing. The company says 1 out of every 4 jetliners rolling off its assembly lines is being bought up by Chinese customers. Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

If China decides to respond to President Donald Trump's announcement Thursday to slap $60 billion of tariffs on Chinese goods, the path to revenge could begin with Boeing, the darling of the rising stock market on which Trump has staked his claim to economic credibility. The measure is partly "based on USTR's 301 investigation into China's state-led, market-distorting efforts to force, pressure, and steal U.S. technologies and intellectual property," principal Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said in a statement Wednesday. The tariffs will be imposed under Section 301 of the 1974 U.S. Trade Act, focusing on Chinese high-tech goods. Trump says Beijing has forced U.S. firms to transfer their intellectual property to China as a cost of doing business there. Washington is also pressing China to reduce its staggering $375 billion trade surplus with the United States by $100 billion. The Chicago-based maker of airplanes for both military and civilian use contributed 24 percent of the gain in the Dow Jones Industrial Average since December 2016, said Howard Silverblatt, senior industry analyst for Index Investment Strategy for S&P Dow Jones Indices. More than 1,200 points of the Dow's rise stems directly from the 117 percent jump in Boeing stock since then.

But Boeing was stock was down more than 2 percent Thursday morning as the Dow fell 390 points in advance of Trump's announcement as investors feared it could trigger a trade war with China. No member of the Dow may have quite as much to lose as Boeing, which announced a $37 billion order for 300 planes from China while Trump was in Beijing last year. That announcement was criticized as simply republicizing old orders to make the president appear to be getting results from the trip. In addition, Boeing has estimated that China will buy as much as $1 trillion of aircraft over the next 20 years, in a bullish forecast released last September. And the government's heavy influence over putative independent Chinese businesses makes those orders vulnerable to political winds. Boeing, with 140,000 employees worldwide, says 1 out of every 4 jetliners rolling off its assembly lines is being bought up by Chinese customers. The aircraft maker has been jostling with European rival Airbus for market share in the world's fastest-growing aviation market, with both opening assembly plants in the country. Boeing has been quiet since Trump's tariff announcement, but the company's chairman and CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, told CNBC's Squawk on the Street on Feb. 15, "It's something we're keeping a close eye on. We've had a very good dialogue with the administration and our Chinese customers, Chinese government. ... It's important that we have a balanced approach to China. …We need fair trade, fair competition. But as you look at the China market from an airplane standpoint … those 41,000 new airplanes, more than 7000 are in China. It's becoming the world's biggest airplane market."

The move comes after Trump visits to Boeing's factory in St. Louis and its plant outside Charleston, South Carolina. And it is the latest step in a tangled relationship that has featured the president using Boeing as a foil, for leverage against other defense contractors, and as a punching bag. Trump's public back-and-forth with Boeing began before he was president, when he criticized the company's 787 jetliner and claimed on Twitter that he was buying Boeing shares in 2013 because it had slumped due to poor reception of the 787. (Boeing shares have risen every year since 2009.) But he also owns a Boeing jet as his personal aircraft. During the transition between his election in 2016 and his inauguration last year, the president asked Boeing to come up with a less-expensive alternative to the F-35 fighter planes made by Lockheed Martin for the United States and more than a half-dozen allies. And he demanded a cut in the price of two new Boeing planes for use as Air Force One, the presidential jet. While the president said in 2016 the two planes would cost an "out of control" $4 billion, a revised deal announced last month calls for the government to spend $3.9 billion. The White House then claimed the old deal would have cost $5.3 billion. Boeing said Trump "negotiated a good deal for the American people.'' — By Tim Mullaney, special to CNBC.com

Watch: Chinese may play their cards carefully in trade response