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.
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.