Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs China announced on Monday that its trade surplus reached almost $1 trillion last year as its exports swamped the globe, while the country’s own businesses and households spent cautiously on imports.When adjusted for inflation, China’s trade surplus last year far exceeded any in the world in the past century, even those of export powerhouses like Germany, Japan or the United States. Chinese factories are dominating global manufacturing on a scale not experienced by any country since the United States after World War II.The outpouring of goods from Chinese factories has drawn criticism from an ever-lengthening list of China’s trade partners. Industrialized and developing countries alike have erected tariffs, attempting to slow the tide. In many instances, China has retaliated in kind, bringing the world closer to a trade war that could further destabilize the global economy.President-elect Donald J. Trump, who will take office next week, has threatened to escalate already aggressive American trade policies aimed at China.On Monday, China’s General Administration of Customs said that the country exported $3.58 trillion worth of goods and services last year, while importing $2.59 trillion. The resulting surplus of $990 billion broke China’s previous record, which was $838 billion in 2022.Strong exports in December, including some that may have been rushed to the United States before Mr. Trump can take office and start raising tariffs, propelled China to a new single-month record surplus of $104.8 billion.While China ran a deficit in oil and other natural resources, its trade surplus in manufactured goods represented 10 percent of China’s economy. By comparison, U.S. reliance on trade surpluses in manufactured goods peaked at 6 percent of American output early in World War I, when factories in Europe had mostly stopped exporting and shifted to wartime production.Many countries seek trade surpluses in manufactured goods because factories create jobs and are important for national security. A trade surplus is the amount by which exports exceed imports.China’s exports of everything from cars to solar panels have been an economic bonanza for the country. Exports have created millions of jobs not just for factory workers, whose inflation-adjusted wages have about doubled in the past decade but also for high-earning engineers, designers and research scientists.At the same time, China’s imports of factory goods have slowed sharply. The country has pursued national self-reliance over the last two decades, most notably through its Made in China 2025 policy, for which Beijing pledged $300 billion to promote advanced manufacturing.China has gone from importing cars to becoming the world’s largest car exporter, surpassing Japan, South Korea, Mexico and Germany. A Chinese, state-owned enterprise has started making single-aisle commercial jetliners, in an attempt to replace Airbus and Boeing jets someday. Chinese companies produce almost all of the world’s solar panels.China’s exports are booming as its domestic economy is suffering. The trade surplus has offset some of the harm from a housing market crash that has scarred businesses and consumers. Millions of construction workers have lost their jobs, while China’s middle class has lost much of its savings. This has left many families reluctant to spend on either imports or domestic goods and services.Overbuilding of China’s factories has started hurting many Chinese companies, which face falling prices, heavy losses and even loan defaults.The backlash to China’s trade imbalance has come from industrialized and developing countries alike. Governments are worried about factory closings and job losses in manufacturing sectors that cannot compete with low prices from China.The European Union and the United States raised tariffs last year on cars from China. But some of the broadest barriers to China’s exports have been put up by less affluent countries with middle-income manufacturing sectors, like Brazil, Turkey, India and Indonesia. They have been on the cusp of industrialization but fear that could slip away.The volume of China’s exports has been rising more than 12 percent a year. The dollar value of its exports has been growing at half that pace, as prices plunged because Chinese companies were producing even more goods than foreign buyers were ready to purchase.The Biden administration, picking up from Mr. Trump’s first term, has led what has become bipartisan criticism that Beijing is using its control of China’s state-owned banks to invest excessively in factory capacity. The banks’ net lending to industry was $83 billion in 2019, before the pandemic. That increased to $670 billion by 2023, although the pace slowed somewhat in the first nine months of last year.“China is making a major mistake in producing two to three times domestic demand in a number of areas, whether it’s steel or robotics or electric vehicles, lithium batteries, solar panels, and then exporting the excess all around the world,” said R. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China.At a news briefing on Monday, Wang Lingjun, vice minister of the customs administration, rejected such criticisms. “It is essentially protectionism to counter China’s development,” he said.China has not run a trade deficit since 1993. Its 2024 trade surplus dwarfs earlier records when adjusted for inflation. Japan’s surplus, for example, peaked in 1993 at $96 billion. That works out to $185 billion in today’s dollars, or less than a fifth of China’s surplus last year.Germany ran enormous trade surpluses in the years following Europe’s financial crisis a decade ago. But its surplus peaked in 2017 at a sum equal to $326 billion in today’s money.Japan’s and Germany’s trade surpluses each topped out at about 1 percent of the rest of the world’s economic output. China’s trade surpluses are twice as big by that measure, said Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.“Since 2021, China has pivoted back toward exports in a big way — and its export growth is increasingly coming at the expense of other manufacturing-heavy economies around the world,” he said.The United States ran persistent trade surpluses from 1870 to 1970, according to researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Most were relatively small, in today’s dollars.After World War II, with much of Europe and East Asia in ruins, American factories shifted from tanks and rifles to cars and washing machines. The U.S. postwar trade surplus peaked at $12 billion in 1947, which works out to about $130 billion in today’s dollars. But because the rest of the world’s output was severely depressed that year, the American trade surplus equaled about 4 percent of the global economy. That is a level China has not yet reached.The widening of China’s trade surplus accounted for up to half the entire country’s economic growth last year. Investment in new factories for exports represented much of the rest of the growth. In a report scheduled for Friday, China’s government is expected to say that the country’s economy expanded about 5 percent last year.China now produces about a third of the world’s manufactured goods, according to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. That is more than the United States, Japan, Germany, South Korea and Britain combined.China has built up its exports through huge investments in education, factories and infrastructure, while maintaining fairly high tariffs and other barriers to imports. Universities churn out more graduates in engineering and related subjects each year than the combined total of graduates in all majors from American colleges and universities.The question is whether China can maintain its lead if other countries raise tariffs. Yet many importers find that China remains the most competitive place to buy goods.Eric Poses, the owner and chief executive of All Things Equal, a Miami Beach firm that invents and distributes board games and electronic tabletop games, uses suppliers in Shanghai. Printing board games costs twice as much in the United States, while the United States does not even manufacture many electronics needed for the tabletop games.“I wish I could do it here in a cost effective manner, but it’s just not possible,” he said.
