‘The tsunami is coming': China's global exports are just getting started

Boston Globe

07-04-2025

"The tsunami is coming for everyone," said Katherine Tai, who was the United States trade representative for former President Joe Biden.
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President Donald Trump's steep tariffs announced Wednesday, which have caused stocks in Asia and elsewhere to plunge, were the most drastic response yet to China's export push. From Brazil and Indonesia to Thailand and the European Union, many countries have already moved more quietly to increase tariffs as well.
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Chinese leaders are furious at the recent proliferation of trade barriers, and particularly Trump's latest tariffs. They take pride in China's high savings rate, long work hours and abundance of engineers and software programmers, as well as its legions of electricians, welders, mechanics, construction workers and other skilled tradespeople.
On state television Saturday night, an anchor solemnly read a government statement condemning the United States: "It is using tariffs to subvert the existing international economic and trade order" so as "to serve the hegemonic interests of the United States."
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Five years ago, before a housing bubble burst, cranes putting up apartment towers dotted practically every city in China. Today, many of those cranes are gone and the ones that are left seldom move. At Beijing's behest, banks have rapidly shifted their lending from real estate to industry.
China is using more factory robots than the rest of the world combined, and most of them are made in China by Chinese companies, although some components are still imported. After several years of rapid growth, overall installations of new factory equipment have already jumped another 18 percent this year.
When Zeekr, a Chinese electric carmaker, opened a factory four years ago in Ningbo, a two-hour drive south of Shanghai, the facility had 500 robots. Now it has 820, and many more are planned.
As new factories come online, China's exports are rapidly accelerating. They rose 13.3 percent in 2023 and then another 17.3 percent last year.
Lending by state banks is also financing a boom in corporate research and development. Huawei, a conglomerate making items as varied as smartphones and auto parts, has just opened a research center in Shanghai for 35,000 engineers that has 10 times as much space for offices and labs as Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Leaders around the world are struggling to decide whether to raise trade barriers to protect what is left of their countries' industrial sectors.
China has been rapidly expanding its share of global manufacturing for decades. The growth came mainly at the expense of the United States and other longtime industrial powers, but also of developing countries. China has increased its share to 32 percent and rising, from 6 percent in 2000.
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China's factory output is bigger than the combined manufacturing of the United States, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain.
Even before Trump won a second term, Biden administration officials warned during their final year in office about industrial overcapacity in China. They raised some tariffs, notably on electric cars.
But during their first three years, Biden administration officials mostly focused on tighter export controls for technologies such as high-end semiconductors, citing national security concerns. They left in place tariffs of 7.5 percent to 25 percent that Trump had imposed on half of China's exports to the United States in his first term.
It remains uncertain how the president's much tougher approach this time will play out. Tariffs have occasionally slowed China's growth in exports, but not stopped it. Other nations are on high alert for the possibility that Chinese exports could be diverted elsewhere, threatening the economies of long-standing US allies such as the EU and South Korea.
Robert E. Lighthizer, who was the US trade representative in Trump's first term, said the latest US tariffs 'are long overdue medicine — the real root cause is decades of Chinese industrial policy that has created breathtaking overcapacity and global imbalances.'
China is exporting so much partly because its own people are buying so little. A housing market crash since 2021 has wiped out much of the savings of the middle class and ruined many wealthy families.
Tax revenues are falling, but military spending is rising rapidly. That has left the government wary of spending on economic stimulus to help consumers. China has offset its housing debacle instead with its export campaign, creating millions of jobs to build, outfit and operate factories.
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Some Chinese economists have recently joined Western economists in suggesting that the country needs to strengthen its meager social safety net. At the start of this year, the minimum government pension for seniors was just $17 a month. That barely buys groceries, even in rural China.
The country's best-known economist, professor Li Daokui of Tsinghua University, publicly called in January for raising the minimum monthly pension several fold, to $110. The Chinese government could afford it, he argued, and extra spending by seniors would stimulate the entire economy.
Chinese officials rejected his advice. When the budget came out March 5, it had an increase in monthly pensions — but it was just $3, bringing it to $20 a month.
The same budget included $100 billion for investments, including ports and other infrastructure that help exporters. And there was a new program to upgrade technology used in manufacturing across 20 Chinese cities.
This article originally appeared in
.