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14-01-2025
BEIJING: China’s exports hit a record high in 2024, state media has reported, a welcome boost for the world’s second-largest economy as United States President-elect Donald Trump’s promised tariffs threaten to dampen growth.
Exports rose 10.7 percent year-on-year, customs data showed on Monday, comfortably beating economists’ forecasts.
Imports, which were widely expected to decline, rose 1 percent, the strongest performance since July 2024, customs data showed.
The stronger-than-expected figures come as Trump is set to return to the White House on January 20 armed with a populist economic agenda that includes sweeping tariffs on Chinese goods.
Economists say Trump’s proposed tariffs would almost certainly raise prices for US consumers and cut into the profit margins of Chinese exporters.
A 60 percent tariff on Chinese imports would lower China’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth by 2.5 percentage points over the following 12 months, analysts at Swiss bank UBS have estimated.
China’s exports look set to remain strong in the near term as firms frontload shipments to avoid higher tariffs, said Zichun Huang, China economist at Capital Economics, in a note.
“Outbound shipments are likely to stay resilient in the near-term, supported by further gains in the global market share thanks to a weak real effective exchange rate,” Huang wrote.
Beijing has in recent months announced some of its most aggressive measures to jumpstart the economy since the COVID-19 pandemic, including policy rate cuts and loosened restrictions on property purchases, amid concerns that its 5 percent GDP growth target is slipping out of reach.
The Chinese economy has been struggling with some of the slowest growth in decades amid a host of challenges including a prolonged real estate crisis, weak consumer sentiment and a declining population.
Beijing is on Friday set to release its GDP figures for the fourth quarter and the whole of 2024.
Last month, the World Bank raised China’s 2024 growth estimate to 4.9 percent, up from its forecast of 4.8 percent in June.
Chinese analyst Victor Gao argues that the US will not be able to stop China’s growth.
Despite the bluster from US officials threatening to slow down China’s economy, time is on China’s side, argues Chinese political analyst Victor Gao.
Gao tells host Steve Clemons that the threats of extra taxes on Chinese goods coming to the US will hurt American consumers more than China.
Gao predicts that, in the end, the US will forfeit relations with Taiwan to keep relations with China. If the US is worried about the flow of superconductor chips from Taiwan, China is open to ideas, including turning the entire island into one big free-trade zone, he says.
Five years ago, Jane Meng travelled from her home in Shanghai to Hong Kong to get herself something special for her birthday.
The 31-year-old wealthy owner of an import-export company was not looking for a watch or a designer handbag. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
