Zhang Yugui and Zhao Yao: China's foreign trade is characterized by "both quantity and quality"

According to the data released by the General Administration of Customs of China on the 13th, the total import and export value of China's goods trade will reach 42.07 trillion yuan in 2022, an increase of 7.7% over 2021, maintaining the status of the world's first trade country in goods for six consecutive years. In terms of US dollars, China's annual import and export volume in 2022 will be 6.31 trillion US dollars, which is an important step since the first breakthrough of 6 trillion US dollars in 2021.
From the perspective of time series, China's foreign trade has reached US $4 trillion for the first time in 2013, and has continuously exceeded US $5 trillion and US $6 trillion in less than ten years. The study shows that the real growth of the global economy during this period is closely related to the overall upward trend of China's import and export. This also highlights the importance of China as the hub of the global industrial chain and supply chain. The main driving force behind this is the sustained and stable overall economic situation, the continuous improvement of quality and efficiency of foreign trade and the high-quality development of manufacturing industry.

The tenacity of China's foreign trade is realized in a relatively complex context. This "complexity" includes the increase of uncertainty factors in China's economy itself, the global economy facing high inflation and low growth, the energy crisis in Europe, the huge spillover effect of the Federal Reserve's continued interest rate increase, and other factors. In addition, the global supply chain is partially broken, the risk of industrial chain decoupling is rising, and the economic sequela caused by superimposed stagflation will bring the world into the "era of high cost economy". The rising trend of China's foreign trade shows that China is better at mastering the macro policy logic and micro operation rules of stabilizing the supply chain, the main body and the market in the turbulent economic environment; More familiar with the development pulse of expanding market share and maintaining export competitiveness under the fierce international market competition and pressure.

In 2022, China's imports and exports to ASEAN, the European Union and the United States were 6.52 trillion, 5.65 trillion and 5.05 trillion yuan, up 15%, 5.6% and 3.7% respectively. Particularly noteworthy is the bilateral trade between China and the United States. Although the United States government has continued to implement economic and trade pressure on China and has continuously advocated "decoupling" from the supply chain of China's industrial chain, the Sino-US trade volume reached a record high of 755.6 billion US dollars in 2021, and continued to maintain the growth momentum in 2022, which fully demonstrates that the rationality of market entities has maintained a certain immunity to the intervention of pan-politicization and pan-security. The effective division of labor and industrial complementarity formed by China and the United States over the years is a solid foundation for the "win-win situation" of the two economies.
Maintaining the status of the world's largest trading country in goods for six consecutive years is not only an indicator of the continuous expansion of China's total foreign trade volume, but also a logical extension of the high-quality development of foreign trade. From the perspective of trade scale, trade structure and the position of export commodities in the global value chain, China's foreign trade is characterized by "both quantity and quality". At present, China plays a key role in the three links of the global industrial chain, namely, the upper, middle and lower reaches, holds nearly 1/3 of the global supply of intermediate goods, and begins to play a pivotal role in the global industrial chain; China has not only gradually climbed to the high-end links of the global value chain in the fields including information, high-end equipment manufacturing, new energy vehicles, etc., but also gradually formed a regional and even international division of labor pattern with China as the upstream country and Vietnam, Indonesia and other regional manufacturing centers as the downstream countries in the middle and low-end links of the global industrial chain division of labor.
The growing resilience of China's economic system, the long-term trend of development and the rich experience accumulated in dealing with major external risks, combined with the burst of business and innovation endowments of hundreds of millions of market entities in China, enable China not only to maintain the status of the world's most important exporter for a long time, but also to become the world's largest consumer market during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, thus providing continuous growth impetus for global economic development. (The authors are the Dean of the School of International Finance and Trade of Shanghai Foreign Studies University and the Master of Business Administration of the Chinese University of Hong Kong)