Trade & Exports

China's external position is unchanged, but its role in trade remedies is not: Beijing has moved from defendant to plaintiff, opening its own anti-dumping case against EU chemical exports. The throughline still holds — a manufactured-goods surplus large enough to make China the default target of foreign trade-remedy action, with the proceeds recycled abroad through the capital account — but the new filing shows China is also an active remedy user, which matters for how Brussels and others price the risk of trading with it.

The core numbers are the same ones already on the record. SAFE's second-quarter balance of payments shows a goods trade surplus of $278.8bn and a current account surplus of $193.7bn; H1 current account reached $378.0bn ¹. August's monthly goods surplus was $116.3bn against a services deficit of only $21.8bn ². Goods carry essentially the whole surplus, which means the pressure point is manufactured volume — precisely the composition that feeds foreign "overcapacity" charges and anti-dumping exposure.

The offset remains the least-read part of the story. The capital and financial account ran a $157.1bn deficit in Q2 and $345.2bn in H1, closely matching the current account ¹. That is net lending to the rest of the world: China runs the surplus and exports the proceeds. The external balance sheet looks sturdier than the headline suggests — end-June full-scale external debt of 170,148bn yuan ($2.498trn) is 59% short-term, but 41% of that short-term stock is trade-related credit and 56% of the total is renminbi-denominated ³.

The new document is the anti-dumping case itself. On 14 September 2026, Jiangsu Huaihe Chemical and Hubei Dongfang Chemical petitioned MOFCOM on behalf of the domestic industry; on 3 October the ministry opened an investigation into p-nitrotoluene originating in the EU, with a dumping period of 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026 and an injury period running from 1 January 2022 ⁴. This is a routine, WTO-consistent instrument, but it is also a signal: China's trade-remedy toolkit is being pointed outward, and EU chemical exporters now sit in the same queue Chinese exporters occupy abroad.

The policy architecture on both legs is intact. On exports, MOFCOM's 2027 auto and motorcycle licence regime (Shang Ban Mao Han No. 404) still demands proof of overseas after-sales and repair networks, with false filings risking suspension or revocation ⁵, and the precursor-chemicals catalogue still routes US, Mexican and Canadian buyers through licensing ⁶. On domestic absorption, Jin Fa No. 17 continues to push domestic trade credit insurance (内贸险) and domestic-foreign trade integration ⁷. These are the channels that convert external surplus into home-market demand.

The multilateral stage keeps thickening ahead of November's APEC leaders' meeting in Shenzhen, run as "APEC China Year" with Putin confirmed as a welcomed guest ⁸. Li Qiang opened the 5th Global Digital Trade Expo in Hangzhou, pitching open-source AI and freer digital trade to roughly 1,200 delegates from nearly 50 countries ⁹, and the National Energy Administration met Singapore's trade-and-industry minister on power interconnection ¹⁰. These are platforms for the narrative, not market-access deliverables.

What remains open is the composition of the outflow — the full H1 2026 Balance of Payments Report is published but its detailed tables are still not populated ¹¹, so the portfolio-versus-direct-investment split is unresolved. The sharper question this round is whether the p-nitrotoluene case is a one-off or the first of a wave: watch MOFCOM's trade-remedy filings, and whether the EU answers in kind.