Trade & Exports

The most consequential development for China's trade this cycle is not a customs figure but a diplomatic one: Xi Jinping will make a state visit to the United States at Trump's invitation, with the MFA calling the two leaders' mutual visits inside six months "historic and milestone" and framing the goal as a constructive strategic-stability relationship ¹. For trade this matters because the prior standing picture — a US destination steadily shrinking behind tariff machinery — now has a diplomatic circuit-breaker attached. Beijing is signalling it wants the US channel actively managed, not merely routed around.

The visit pushes US-China friction toward a bargaining phase rather than an escalation phase, but the remedy docket stays the baseline. Tin mill countervailing duties with a critical-circumstances retroactivity finding ², the steel-rack administrative review ³ and USTR's 2027 National Trade Estimate comment pipeline that historically feeds Section 301 actions ⁴ all remain in place. A head-of-state visit sits above that machinery; it does not switch it off.

Beijing is not disarming while it talks. On 10 September MOFCOM extended its anti-dumping investigation into pecans from Mexico and the United States to 25 March 2027, citing case complexity under Article 26 of the Anti-Dumping Regulations ⁵. This is China's own trade-remedy instrument aimed at US agriculture — a sector with outsized political weight in Washington — extended, not dropped, days before the visit was announced. The read: leverage stays on the table in the middle of a thaw.

The hard core is unchanged. NBS August data show industrial value added up 5.2% year-on-year, equipment manufacturing up 12.1% and high-tech manufacturing up 16.7%, with lithium-ion battery output up 57.2% and industrial robots up 34.6% ⁶ — output that must keep finding foreign buyers and that keeps generating overcapacity pressure. SAFE's August read showed $1.5 trillion in non-bank cross-border receipts and payments, a net inflow of $62.4 billion (up 4% m/m) led by goods trade, a services deficit widened 6% on study-abroad and travel, and a corporate FX settlement ratio of 61.5%, 2.7 points below the January-July average ⁷.

The diversification scaffolding kept building in parallel. The 23rd China-ASEAN Expo ran 17-21 September in Nanning under the "CAFTA 3.0 Opportunities, Better Life" theme, covering about 170,000 square metres with more than 3,400 companies from over 70 countries ⁸. CIFTIS closed in Beijing on 13 September after nearly 100 conferences and over 100 matchmaking events, with MOFCOM's Zhu Guangyao pledging high-standard opening in services ⁹. Liaoning's January-August trade hit a same-period record 527.4 billion yuan with exports up 13.4%, ASEAN the top partner at 97.2 billion yuan (+19.1%), Africa up 83.8% and Central Asia up 91% ¹⁰ — the cleanest proof that redirection converts into hard numbers.

Two quieter channels opened. NEA head Wang Hongzhi met Singapore's Senior Minister of State Yan Xiaofang on 10 September to discuss APEC energy cooperation and power-grid interconnection ¹¹ — trade-adjacent infrastructure diplomacy. And Xi's Global Development Initiative, five years old, now claims over $23 billion mobilised and more than 2,000 cooperation projects across 70-plus countries ¹, the development-finance arm of the same diversification strategy.

The net judgment: the ASEAN and Belt-and-Road channel is institutionalising faster than the US channel is closing, and the US channel itself is now under active diplomatic management rather than passive decay. Watch two things — whether the Xi visit yields a concrete tariff rollback or purchase commitment, and whether CAFTA 3.0 moves from expo theme to a signed protocol. The pecan extension is the tell that Beijing intends to negotiate from strength, not surrender.