A deep dive into China’s trade landscape: global export share and hot industries

As markets anticipate US president-elect Donald Trump's intentions on international trade and tariffs, we've created long-term, holistic visualizations of China's exports.

China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, and as our first chart shows, that's when its rising share of global goods exports started accelerating. From 4.3% that year, China's share had approached 14% by 2015.

It's interesting to look back at the first Trump term: while China's share of exports slipped back around the time of his election, its share resumed increasing through 2018-19, when the president was rolling out tariffs.

As we have written previously, that period is when "trade diversion" to non-US markets picked up. We can see the result of this trend in our second visualization: This pie chart shows that when grouped together, the ASEAN nations have become the biggest destination, accounting for more than 16% of exports year to date in 2024. That surpasses the European Union and the US, at 14.7% and 14.5% respectively.

Our final four charts break down the important factors driving month-by-month export trends over the past two years. Since mid-2023, China's export growth has been driven by quantity, not price; mechanical and electrical goods have been a notable driver of growth in 2024. (In October of this year, China's exports were growing at a 12.7% year-on-year pace in USD terms.)

Our final heat map takes an even more granular look at the relative performance of different industries in the export mix. Aluminum and iron have had positive momentum recently; mobile phones and ships have been weaker in 2024 than they were in 2023.

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