BEIJING, July 14 (APP):In the first half of 2025, China’s total goods trade – imports and exports combined – rose 2.9 percent year-on-year to reach 21.79 trillion yuan, or about $3.05 trillion. It is a figure that, at a glance, might appear modest for an economy accustomed to breakneck surges. But place it in the context of a world bristling with tariff threats, transshipment crackdowns, fragile truces, and geopolitical distrust, and a different picture emerges.
Exports grew a sturdy 7.2 percent in yuan terms, while imports slipped 2.7 percent overall. The contrast speaks volumes about China’s current place in the world economy – still a formidable workshop to the world, but confronting the reality of muted domestic demand at home, according to an article published by CEN.
Nowhere is the complexity of China’s trade story clearer than in its ties with the United States, still the single largest export market but now also the most fractious. In June, China’s exports to the U.S. dropped 16.1 percent year-on-year – marking the third consecutive month of decline – even as shipments to the rest of the world picked up the slack. Exports to Southeast Asia surged nearly 17 percent, and sales to the European Union rose over 7 percent. What one door closes, other creaks open.
This quiet redirection is neither accidental nor entirely improvisational. It is an outcome of hard lessons learned over a half-decade of trade spats, supply chain disruptions, and the realization that reliance on a single market – no matter how large – is no longer a guarantee of stability.
The Geneva and London understandings, struck earlier this year, briefly paused a bruising tariff war that saw prohibitive levies climb above 100 percent. Yet the calendar is not comforting. The August 12 deadline for a more permanent settlement looms large, and with it, the risk of another escalation that could once more entangle factories, ports, and consumers on both sides of the Pacific.
In the interim, Chinese exporters have done what they do best: move quickly, diversify routes, and lean into relationships that promise fewer abrupt jolts. Exports to the Southeast Asian neighbour soared nearly 24 percent last month, a reflection of how transshipment channels have become part of the new normal in global trade.
Meanwhile, China’s trade surplus continues to swell. At nearly $586 billion for the first half of this year – up more than a third from the same period in 2024 – it underscores a simple fact: the world still needs Chinese goods.
And so, the trade data tells a tale not just of containers and cargo ships, but of a country reasserting its economic resilience while reckoning with a world more splintered than at any point since the Cold War’s end. The old certainties – of linear globalization, of the unimpeded flow of goods and capital – no longer apply as they once did. They have given way to supply chain caution, nearshoring experiments, and tariff brinkmanship wielded as domestic political theatre.
Yet China’s exporters do not have the luxury of nostalgia. In the warehouses of Shenzhen and the ports of Qingdao, there is only the next order, the next route, the next workaround. The capacity to improvise is what has carried China through three decades of relentless integration into the global economy – and what now sustains it as that same global economy pulls in contradictory directions.
The coming weeks may determine whether the fragile Geneva truce holds or splinters. If talks falter and tariffs snap back into place, the jolts will be felt far beyond Beijing or Washington. From electronics in Europe to rare minerals for next-generation batteries, the supply chains that bind the world together still trace their origins back to China’s factory floors.
