Donald Trump kicked off a new era of Western economic rivalry with Beijing when he took office in 2017. As he prepares for his second term, China’s dominance of global manufacturing is greater than ever.
China just posted a trade surplus with the rest of the world of almost $1 trillion for 2024, according to official data released this week. That giant gap between exports and imports—roughly equal to the annual output of Poland—is now three times what it was in 2018 when decades of Western orthodoxy favoring open trade were upended by Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports.
China today accounts for around 27% of global industrial production, according to United Nations data, up from 24% in 2018. By 2030, the U.N. predicts, China’s share of industry will have risen to 45%—a level of dominance unmatched since the U.S.’s postwar manufacturing heyday or the U.K.’s in the 19th century.
For Washington and its allies, this ascendancy shows that efforts to reduce their dependence on China are coming up short. That suggests it will remain hard for Trump to rebalance U.S.-China trade relations, even if he pushes tariffs higher.
Over the past several years, the U.S. has placed tariffs on billions of dollars of Chinese imports and offered subsidies to chip makers and other companies in strategic industries. To varying degrees, governments from Berlin to Tokyo have embraced a similar policy mix to rejuvenate their factory sectors and shield strategic champions from Chinese competition.
But China has responded by finding other customers, subsidizing its factories and working around the levies by moving production to other countries. Those strategies are keeping China’s factory floor intact for now, though its economic problems are multiplying, with excess capacity, the specter of deflation and collapsing corporate profits all weighing on growth.
The result is an increasingly unbalanced global economy, which many analysts and Western politicians fear can’t continue.
The expansion of China’s global share of production anticipated by the U.N. means other countries’ slice of manufacturing will need to shrink unless something changes. Losers will be manufacturing-led economies such as Germany, Japan, and potentially the U.S., as well as poor countries hoping to move up the development ladder by building factories to compete with China.
Those trends are setting up debates over what, if anything, the U.S. and its allies should do.
Trump has pledged stiffer, across-the-board tariffs on Chinese imports, potentially of 60% or more. His incoming trade chief has floated the idea of imposing tariffs on imports from third countries made with Chinese parts, or made by Chinese companies.
President Biden’s administration married tariffs with new export controls on advanced semiconductor technology on national security grounds, while also tightening rules around U.S. investment in China.
The European Union has been more cautious, but there are signs its attitude to Chinese trade practices is hardening, bringing the bloc closer to the U.S. It levied tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles last year and this week accused China of unfairly discriminating against European medical device makers in its domestic market, setting the stage for further retaliation.
The U.K.’s Trade Remedies Authority in November recommended levying tariffs of 83.5% on Chinese excavators after a monthslong antidumping investigation.
