China ends 2025 with record $1.5 trillion trade surplus despite Trump tariffs
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Chinese exporters successfully sought out customers in other markets when shipments to the US plunged on Trump tariffs.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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BEIJING - China on Jan 14 reported a strong export run in 2025 with a record trillion-dollar surplus, as producers braced themselves for three more years of a Trump administration set on slowing the production powerhouse by shifting US orders to other markets.
Beijing’s resilience to renewed tariff tensions since US President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 has emboldened Chinese firms to shift their focus to South-east Asia, Africa and Latin America to offset US duties.
With Beijing looking to exports to counteract a prolonged property slump and sluggish domestic demand, the record-shattering surplus risks further unsettling economies concerned about China’s trade practices and overcapacity, as well as their over-reliance on key Chinese products.
The manufacturing powerhouse’s full-year trade surplus came in at US$1.19 trillion (S$1.5 trillion) – a figure on a par with the gross domestic product of a top 20 economy globally like Saudi Arabia – having broken the trillion-dollar ceiling for the first time in November
Outbound shipments grew 6.6 per cent in value terms year on year in December, compared with a 5.9 per cent increase in November. Economists polled by Reuters had expected a 3 per cent increase.
Imports were up 5.7 per cent, after a 1.9 per cent bump the month earlier, and beat a forecast of a 0.9 per cent uptick.
Monthly export surpluses exceeded US$100 billion seven times in 2025, partially underpinned by a weakened yuan, up from just once in 2024, underscoring that Mr Trump’s actions have barely dented China’s trade with the wider world even if he has curbed US-bound shipments.
Economists expect China to continue gaining global market share in 2026, helped by Chinese firms setting up overseas production hubs that provide lower-tariff access to the US and the European Union, as well as by strong demand for lower-grade chips and other electronics.
A flagship of Beijing’s global industrial ambitions, China’s auto industry saw overall exports jump 19.4 per cent to 5.79 million vehicles in 2025, with pure electric vehicle shipments up 48.8 per cent. China would likely remain the world’s top auto exporter for a third year after first superseding Japan in 2023.
Beijing, however, has shown signs of recognising it must moderate its industrial exports if it is to sustain its success, and the leadership has been increasingly cognisant and vocal about imbalances in China’s economy and the image problem outsized exports are causing.
After November’s trillion-dollar surplus data, Chinese Premier Li Qiang was quoted last week on national television as calling for “proactively expanding imports and promoting the balanced development of imports and exports”.
The country also scrapped subsidy-like export tax rebates for its solar industry, a longstanding point of friction with EU states.
Lawmakers in December passed revisions to the Foreign Trade Law after two, rather than the usual three, readings, in a signal to members of a major trans-Pacific trade pact that China is prepared to shift from industrial subsidies and towards freer, more open trade.
Despite the year-long truce on tariffs that Mr Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping struck in late October, US duties of 47.5 per cent on Chinese goods are well above the roughly 35 per cent level analysts say enables Chinese firms to export to the US at a profit. REUTERS
