When the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, took to the podium at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week to lament how “great economic powers” were dismantling the international order, it seemed clear that he was talking about the United States. He might have been talking about China as well.
Not a week earlier, Beijing had revealed that China’s trade surplus ballooned by 20% in 2025, to $1.2tn. Despite Donald Trump’s wall of tariffs that crashed Chinese sales to the US, its overall exports expanded more than 5%. Sales to the 11 countries in Asia’s Asean bloc increased more than 13%. Exports to the European Union rose over 8%. Chinese imports, by contrast, were flat.
This gargantuan imbalance is strangling manufacturers from rich countries in Europe to poorer nations in Asia and Latin America. As Eswar Prassad, a former head of the China division at the International Monetary Fund, now at Cornell University, pointed out: “Forget Trump’s Tariffs. The Real Danger Lies in China’s Trade Surplus.”
Many factors contributed to the implosion of American governance. But Trump’s rise was largely propelled by a sense of grievance against a world order that, Americans believed, had taken the US for a ride.
America’s pain was largely self-inflicted. Manufacturing’s footprint shrunk in Germany over the last quarter century, like it did in the US. It shrunk in the UK and France, Italy and Japan. While those shifts have caused domestic political disruptions, in none of these other countries did voters try to punish the rest of the world for the loss, as Trump has.
The country with the most scientists and engineers in the world, and a decades-long policy of investimg in education and public infrastructure, is outcompeting everyone else at manufacturing? I’m shocked!
Eswar Prassad, a former head of the China division at the International Monetary Fund
Maybe your advise to poor countries to cut all public services and sell everything to Western companies was wrong, IMF shill? Maybe countries should instead invest in their people and their infrastructure? Radical, I know. Heresy, even.
China’s overbearing exports are changing minds about the benefits of open trade well beyond the United States.
If China is so “overbearing,” don’t trade with them. Don’t buy their products. Follow the US’s lead and tariff the hell out of Chinese imports. You don’t have to import Chinese products. You can choose to not buy Chinese stuff. No one is forcing you to buy Chinese products.
Follow the US’s lead
Smear shit on my face, stab my friends, murder my own people, rape children then go bankrupt?
The comment is a response to the title - that China’s exports are “overbearing” as if China is inflicting trade on others unilaterally. The point is that whatever extent to which the US is a victim in this, it was a victim entirely by choice, and a great many people in the US for richer for it. They could have decided not to bypass the local labour market by using China for manufacturing, but there was profit to be made. China just got good at it and used it to their advantage.
Is the problem that China is too good at what they do, therefore we need to artificially redirect demand to less-competitive alternatives?
The capitalist mindset is a sight to behold. Hopefully future generations learn from our mistakes and laugh at us for the dipshits that we are.
Everyone was happy when they could outsource dirty and labor-intensive jobs to China and benefit from the cheap products. China gladly took on these tasks and built a monopoly. Now, it is the sole source for most minerals and rare earth elements because everyone else stopped producing them. China is now moving up the value chain, processing these raw materials into higher-value products. However, the world has become so dependent on China’s mineral supplies that countries cannot block trade with China without risking their own production halts, since China could also stop selling the materials they rely on. This is already happening with rare earth minerals and other critical resources like tungsten.
Only way put of this would be a long time strategic investment into local manufacturing capacities, but it will cost a lot and take a lot of time. And China will dump the prices until those companies go out of business again and then we are back at the start. Happened with solar, is happening with batteries, I wonder what will be next…
From industrial revolution to 1975, US generally runs a trade surplus: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2019/may/historical-u-s-trade-deficits
Which truly has little to do with the here and now.
The US trade deficit ballooned to $56.8 billion in November 2025, crushing economists’ forecasts of $43.4 billion and nearly doubling from October’s revised $29.2 billion.
The overall trade balance of the United States in the first half of 2025 was -$606 billion.
The largest trade deficits held by the United States in 2024 were with China (-$295 billion), Mexico (-$172 billion), Vietnam (-$123 billion), Ireland (-$87 billion), and Germany (-$85 billion).
Somehow, statistics rarely reflect the massive trade surplus the U.S. enjoys in digital services. Link The country deliberately shifted its focus away from manufacturing, outsourcing production globally. With the freed-up capacity, it built a digital empire that generates billions of dollars annually.
The catch? This digital surplus flows almost exclusively into the pockets of a few corporate leaders. Meanwhile, the majority of people are left with shrinking incomes from former manufacturing jobs, jobs that once distributed wealth more evenly across small businesses and the workforce.
That’s why down voted, dumb fuck talking about high school popularity.
