Trade & Exports

China’s export engine still runs at full tilt, but the new constraint is no longer demand — it is diplomacy. At the G20 finance ministers’ meeting in Asheville on September 1, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is pressing the group to cut trade imbalances and is floating higher barriers on Chinese goods; talks on the joint communiqué are stalled over the wording on imbalances and critical minerals ¹. This turns the prior watch-item about a G20 rebuke into an active negotiating reality. Beijing’s response is already visible: managed export pricing, physical trade-corridor building, and a widening web of sub-national trade diplomacy.

The diversification machinery keeps producing numbers. MOFCOM spokesperson Huang Ling said trade with other SCO members hit 8% of total foreign trade in 2025, rising from $12.1 billion in 2001 to $523.5 billion ². The infrastructure under those numbers is catching up: Chinese builders are drilling the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Railway tunnel in Jalal-Abad, Kyrgyzstan, and Air China launched direct Beijing-Bishkek flights on July 17 ³. At the granular level, Liaoning’s third export fair in Ulaanbaatar brought 89 companies and a $4 million steel-structure order ⁴, while the 30th Shandong-Taiwan fair opened in Weifang on August 31 ⁵. Even Macao is being mobilized: its trade seminar in Jakarta generated 36 cooperation projects across tourism, high-tech, TCM and Muslim-friendly initiatives ⁶.

The other half of the strategy is pricing discipline. Bloomberg reports China has told carmakers to keep the domestic price war away from export markets ⁷. That is an explicit admission that overcapacity-driven price competition at home could spill abroad and trigger anti-dumping cases. It is also a sign that export policy is now managed as a macro-tool: Beijing is willing to cap volume-driven market share to protect the overall trade balance from retaliation.

Washington’s trade-remedy machinery, meanwhile, keeps grinding. The Federal Register on September 1 published the final results of an expedited third sunset review keeping the antidumping order on Chinese steel grating in place, initiated a fresh round of five-year sunset reviews, and opened the window for administrative review requests ^8,9,10. These are procedural but they are the teeth that give Bessent’s G20 pressure concrete deterrent power.

There are also limits to the managed-trade narrative. Taiwan is independently deepening its own economic integration with Europe, and that complicates the mainland’s diversification calculus. Taiwan President Lai Ching-te told the Invest EU Forum that Taiwan-EU trade reached nearly $75 billion last year and that TEEMA plans a tech park in Poland; he called for a double-taxation treaty and investment-protection agreement ¹¹. A similar Italy trade mission is in Taipei ¹². These are not China trade documents, but they signal that Taiwan is racing to lock in supply-chain links with the very markets Beijing is courting.

Implications: expect China’s surplus to stay large, but the politics around it are now the center of gravity. The G20 communiqué language — or its absence — will be the near-term tell. If the US succeeds in framing China as the surplus problem, look for faster Beijing moves on procurement and on downstream corridor projects to show good faith. If the communiqué weakens the language, the pressure will simply migrate to WTO cases and unilateral tariffs. Either way, the export story is now a trade-policy story, not a customs-statistics story.