If you don’t see them, you hear them. On any July Fourth or New Year’s Eve, it’s common to experience the loud pop of a firework or see it colorfully explode into the sky and hang there briefly.

Zoldan said he has paused production at the company’s manufacturing facilities in China. The numbers tell a stark story for consumer-grade fireworks, which now carry a 109.3% tariff, up from 5.3 ...

But the elaborate, computer-controlled displays of contemporary fireworks shows are a long way from the medium’s simpler beginnings in ancient China. The thinking goes that someone living in ...