According to China, their exports hit a new high in 20204.
China’s foreign trade hit a record high in total value in 2024 as the world’s second-largest economy further consolidated its top position globally in goods trade.
The nation’s total goods imports and exports in yuan reached 43.85 trillion yuan (about 6.1 trillion U.S. dollars) last year, up 5 percent year on year, according to data released Monday by the General Administration of Customs (GAC).
Exports grew 7.1 percent year on year to 25.45 trillion yuan last year, while imports expanded 2.3 percent from one year earlier to 18.39 trillion yuan, the data showed.
I have my doubts.
We looked at the situation just under a year ago, and there hasn’t been any shortage of “China is doomed” videos (many from China Observer) depicting the effects of of deep recessions in many of China’s export sectors since then. Video after video shows closed factories, shuttered storefronts, and people complaining about a lack of jobs.
This one, from a year ago, talks about a drastic decline in Chinese exports:
Here’s a video on how Microsoft is just the latest western company to pull out of China entirely:
Or this video from early December, showing how supply chain companies in Guangzhou are failing from lack of business and vast rows of shops are now closed:
Nor have things improved this year. This video, from two months ago, of a businessman complaining that no one is buying industrial machinery because exports are way down:
Or this video of Shanghai from five days ago, talking about a 90% decline in foreign investment in China and how lots of shops in Shanghai are closing down.
Or another video from five days ago, of Yiwu International Trade City already reeling from Trump’s sanctions:
Somebody, somewhere is lying about the strength of China’s economy and the health of their export sector. Remember, there were already plenty signs of a slowing economy in China before Trump took office. Is China Observer overselling economic difficulties in China? Probably some. Gloom and doom is their stock in trade. You never get any “Everything in China is honky dory!” videos from them (with good reason). But I don’t think they’re making things up from whole cloth.
Everyone know China’s communist rulers manipulate economic figures to their advantage. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that they’re falsifying their export statistics to make things look better than they are. I rather strongly suspect that their hand in the trade war poker game they’re having with Trump is much weaker than they let on.
Tags: China, China Observer, Communism, Economics, Foreign Policy, tariffs, trade, video
Even a casual search for China’s trade data indicates that that they have been running a capital and financial account deficit from Q1 2022-Q4 2024.
This suggests capital flight is in progress.
The PBOC has been struggling to keep a real estate bubble from deflating. It has been thought necessary to adopt a loose monetary policy, thereby enabling bad loans to be refinanced with reduced interest rates.
As is usually the case when currency is being debased through expansive monetary policy, profits become inflated, which leads to an increased tax burden. This pressures businesses to pull back on spending as retained earnings plummet.
It is highly improbable that slowing business activity can be offset by easing loan rates. The greater likelihood is that business activity is contracting and pulling consumer spending lower, as well.
China seems to have entered a period of economic deceleration. Of course this is the very opposite of what the CCP claims but it would be unwise to place very much faith in their GDP numbers.
China is running an out of control supply side economy. This produces severe deflation of the kind which bedeviled the world during the 1930’s.
The strongest arguments for tariffs on China’s exports is to prevent them from further exporting deflation, which they have been doing since 2021. Drooling Joe’s puppet masters were fine with China’s exportation of deflation, because it seemingly offset the inflation which should have resulted from Drooling Joe’s massive federal deficit spending.
“China is running an out of control supply side economy. This produces severe deflation of the kind which bedeviled the world during the 1930’s.”
Comrade Cartridge is in his usual state of panic. This time, it’s because too much is being “supplied” or produced. What could possibly be worse than an economy that produces too many consumer goods?
Answer: a Bolshevik economy that produces too little.
The Chines Communist Party was witness to the USSR’s collapse. They wanted to make sure of their own safety so they embarked on a strategy of deregulation and economic liberalism. In practice, the economy more closely resembles fascist Italy than Soviet Russia.
The economy remains centrally planned but the means of production are not centrally owned.
As with any centrally planed economy, consumers are not sovereign in determining what goods will be produced so it is inevitable that there will be too many consumer goods manufactured in some cases, too little in others.
What China cannot consume it exports and what it consumer goods it failed to produce it must now import. So it is ignorant ranting to assert that China overproduces consumer goods, thereby threatening to plunge the world into another Great Depression.
This “oversupply” signals that other consumer goods are in short supply. Thus, there can never be absolute overproduction, there can only be some goods being overproduced at the expense of others—a lost opportunity cost.
Opportunity costs are an Econ 101 topic but a few people seem unable to grasp this simple concept and so it becomes necessary on occasion to offer a remedial lesson on the role of costs in making economic decisions.
“Comrade Cartridge is in his usual state of panic. This time, it’s because too much is being “supplied” or produced. What could possibly be worse than an economy that produces too many consumer goods?”
You need a “remedial lesson” in the causes and consequences of the Great Depression to appreciate the catastrophe of deflation caused by massive oversupply.
Simply put: Goods & services become cheaper, but no one can afford them even at fire sale prices. Hunger and privation stalk the lands.
“You need a ‘remedial lesson’ in the causes and consequences of the Great Depression…”
Au contraire, mon frere! You need to familiarize yourself with business cycle theory. I suggest you start with chapters 20-22 in “Human Action”.
There is no threat of supply-side chaos in a market economy. “One kind of production would seldom outstrip every other, and it’s products be disproportionately cheapened were production left entirely free.”—French economist JB Say
“Hunger and privation stalk the lands.” Does Z-Putin have your approval now that hunger and privation follow in the train of his Special Military Operation?
Those damn Ukro-NAZIs were overproducing cereal grains for export to hungry customers, which threatens to plunge the entire world into a deflationary vortex from which civilization will never reemerge. As a bonus, Z-Putin flattened all those production facilities in the Donbas, which were were ominously increasing supply, leading to a catastrophic deflation.
MOAR war please! It’s the only corrective to overproduction.
In 1929, after Stalin evicted Trotsky from the USSR, he began implementing ‘Socialism In One Country’. Stalin dumped cereal grains on the world market to finance machinery purchases. USSR cereal grain exports went from negligible in 1928 to 5 million metric tons per annum from 1929 to 1933. Grain exports continued at an elevated level (1.5 million metric tons p.a.) up to WW II. They would have continued at 5 MMT p.a., but every country tariffed the USSR grain exports.
Stalin’s grain policies caused the Holomodor and collapsed farm incomes across the world, inaugurating the Great Depression. There were other factors, notably an attempt by the Federal Reserve to inoculate gold flows, but the United States was primarily an agricultural exporter in 1929 and our markets were drowning in supply.
The result was deflation caused by oversupply. Hunger and privation stalked the lands.
[…] Somebody’s Lying About Chinese Exports. “Somebody, somewhere is lying about the strength of China’s economy and the health of their […]
This must be the first time in world history that grain became too cheap to buy.
No doubt this phenomenon also led to Mad Dog 20/20 becoming too cheap to drink, thus ending alcoholism among hobos. That is why you never see them any more.
On one side, of business contraction, you have a number of real world videos from the Middle Kingdom itself as well as from shipping trackers worldwide. On the other side, of glowing business success, you have…text, from official and semi-official sources.
So obviously the rest of the world should believe the text.
“This must be the first time in world history that grain became too cheap to buy.
No doubt this phenomenon also led to Mad Dog 20/20 becoming too cheap to drink, thus ending alcoholism among hobos. That is why you never see them any more.”
Income per American farm averaged about $ 1,000 in 1928. It dropped to less than $ 500 per farm by 1932, at the peak of Stalin’s cereal grain export frenzy. Farming accounted for about half of all American economic activity and jobs in 1928, so its collapse ricocheted through the entire economy.
Farmers couldn’t pay their mortgages and got foreclosed. Farmers couldn’t hire labor to harvest crops, so crops rotted in the field and farmworkers became destitute. The banks couldn’t sell the foreclosed farms and went bust, creating a black hole for capital. No one bought vehicles and machinery, so industrial America collapsed as well.
Unemployment reached at least 25% by 1932 and most unemployed received no government benefits. So many unemployed males became hobos, traveling the country trying to find pockets of economic activity where they could earn a living.
Grain became too expensive for all the many, many unemployed, regardless of how low its price sank. You cannot buy food with a zero income. Soup kitchens did a thriving business, but only in urban settings. Rural populations were reduced to hunter/gathering, the inescapable consequence of brain dead libertarian economic policies.
Excess supply haunted the American economy until World War II. The Great Depression is the single best example of supply side economics triggering catastrophic deflation.
Simply put: Goods & services become cheaper, but no one can afford them even at fire sale prices.
Yet even in the deepest depths of the Great Depression, 71% of the US populace was employed.
No one starved even thought the Roosevelt administration was poring milk into the sewers and dumping produced into the ocean in a futile attempt to boost commodity prices.
Marginal tax rates jumped from 25% to 63%, choking off capital expenditures. If you can’t recapitalize old factories or build new ones, unemployment will remain unresolved. If capital is being shoveled into federal coffers, there will be less of it available to make new loans or refinance old ones.
The duration and depth of America’s Great Depression was caused by tariffs, bad monetary policy, even worse fiscal policy and unprecedented market regulation. Economic activity was stultified beneath this load. Grain prices figured into matters little or not at all.
“Marginal tax rates jumped from 25% to 63%, choking off capital expenditures.”
The U.S. income tax rate increase on high earners which you refer to did not occur until 1933, four years after Stalin’s cereal export frenzy and the Great Depression began. It made things worse, but played no role in creating the Great Depression.
“If you can’t recapitalize old factories or build new ones, unemployment will remain unresolved. If capital is being shoveled into federal coffers, there will be less of it available to make new loans or refinance old ones.”
Capital was extinguished during the Great Depression by the bank collapses which followed widespread farm foreclosures. This also occurred long before federal tax rates increased.
“The duration and depth of America’s Great Depression was caused by tariffs, bad monetary policy, even worse fiscal policy and unprecedented market regulation. Economic activity was stultified beneath this load. Grain prices figured into matters little or not at all.”
Some reading for you:
‘Farm Product Prices, Redistribution, And The Early U.S. Great Depression’ by Hausman et al, NBER Working Paper 28055, 2020
‘The Political Economy of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act’ by B.J. Eichengreen, NBER Working Paper 2001, 1986
‘The Smoot-Hawley Tariff: Quantitative Assessment’ by D.A. Irwin, NBER Working Paper 5509, 1996
Douglas Irwin received the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research’s F.A. Hayek prize for his work on the Great Depression, so you will have some difficulty glibly dismissing his work.
“Some reading for you:”
First Rule of Teaching: the teacher must know that which he would teach.
I never asked for your teaching guidance and don’t believe you are competent to offer it. My professors judged me worthy of receiving Highest Department Honors in Economics. The entire department had to sign off on this.
Unlike you, they were competent to evaluate their student’s understanding of economic theory.
It’s long past time for you to STFU and find someone else who is willing to be misled like you.
But it ain’t me, babe.
“I never asked for your teaching guidance and don’t believe you are competent to offer it. My professors judged me worthy of receiving Highest Department Honors in Economics. The entire department had to sign off on this.”
You are parroting shibboleths and refusing to consider opposing views. A sad reflection on modern education which has become credentialized to the exclusion of thought.
How many of your “entire department” wrote NBER working papers on the Great Depression? Or any at all?