Chinese Economics Thread

Sinnavuuty

Senior Member
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Regarding american imports into china, what products can't china replace easily? I'm guessing semiconductor equipment, passenger aircraft and some high end pharmaceuticals and medical equipment. Anything else?
Here is a complete list of products that China imports from the US, according to the US-China Business Council:
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Oilseeds and grains: $18.5 billion
Oil and gas: $17.6 billion
Other: $15.9 billion
Pharmaceuticals and medicines: $11.3 billion
Semiconductors and components: $6.8 billion
Aerospace products and parts: $6.8 billion
Navigational and measurement instruments: $6.8 billion
Basic chemicals: $6.5 billion
Motor vehicles: $6.1 billion
Resins and synthetic fibers: $5.5 billion
Industrial machinery: $5 billion
Meat products: $4.5 billion
Medical equipment and supplies: $3.6 billion
General purpose machinery: $2.6 billion
Miscellaneous crops: $2.4 billion
Scrap products: $2.4 billion
Pulp and paperboard mill products: $2.1 billion
Miscellaneous manufactured commodities: $2.1 billion
Computer equipment: $1.8 billion
Non-ferrous metal products: $1.8 billion
Motor vehicle parts: $1.7 billion
Electrical equipment and components: $1.7 billion
Miscellaneous fabricated metal products: $1.6 billion
Plastic products: $1.4 billion
Engines and turbines: $1.4 billion
Electrical equipment: $1.3 billion
Communications and service industry machinery: $1.3 billion
Soaps, cleaning agents and toiletries: $1.3 billion
Fruits and tree nuts: $1.1 billion
Coal and petroleum gases: $1.1 billion
Marine products: $1 billion
 

Sinnavuuty

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bebops

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With all the trade war going on, I am most interested to see what is China's GDP rate and trade surplus at the end of the year.

If China is able to obtain 650billion trade surplus, I still call it a winning situation. China had nearly 1 trillion last year.
 

Wrought

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Paper on sophisticated Chinese economic retaliatory capabilities developed since 2018, which provide an expanded toolkit now.

However, since 2018, this pattern of behavior has been evolving. China’s economic statecraft—specifically its tools of coercion—has been expanding. Whereas in the past China mainly used basic trade or investment incentives and sanctions, today China is developing, testing, and deploying an entirely new collection of legal and regulatory tools for the explicit purpose of imposing targeted costs on companies and countries it sees as acting against its interests. In effect, these are precision-guided economic munitions, designed to inflict targeted and often substantial pain for political and geopolitical purposes.

China developed these tools in the last several years to give it better options to retaliate against the economic and technology restrictions of other countries, especially the United States. Since 2018, when the first Trump administration launched a trade war against China, Chinese officials have concluded that their past coercive tools were not fit for purpose. Beijing explicitly prioritized the development of a set of new legal mechanisms—often mirroring US export control rules, sanctions, and investment restrictions—to respond more effectively. China developed these instruments gradually and tested them episodically before seeking to ramp up their usage.

In these early days of the second Trump administration, all indications are that China will rely even more heavily on its new economic weapons as Beijing seeks to build negotiating leverage by inflicting highly targeted damage to a small number of high-profile US firms and industries. This approach stands out as an evolving and increasingly asymmetric response to Trump’s actions—and one that seeks to change the calculus for how far US policymakers can go in pressuring the wider Chinese export and tech sectors.

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Sinnavuuty

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Important measure here.

GoV5CPxXcAAQLu9

Chinese "dependence"
 

manqiangrexue

Brigadier
Last edited:

Wrought

Junior Member
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A fairly anodyne piece on its own, but it speaks to much deeper and more fundamental issue: laws are only as good as their enforcement. US Customs and Border Patrol is already
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at the same time it's trying to handle
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. Not even accounting for DOGE disruptions and so forth.

Now, some of these suppliers are trying to keep their businesses humming by offering a simple—but illegal—solution to U.S.
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sellers: lying about the value of the Amazon merchandise you are importing to the U.S. in an effort to lower the duties you’ll have to pay under the new slate of tariffs.

Yes, that sounds a lot like customs fraud.

In emails and WeChat messages viewed by Fortune, around a half dozen Chinese suppliers proposed such illegal workarounds to executives from a mid-sized household goods brand with a large presence on Amazon.

“Many US companies use a lower value invoice to make customs clearance to reduce the tariff,” one supplier wrote to the U.S. brand. “You can think about it.”

“We can revise the declared value on commercial invoices to help duty costs,” another said.

Some also proposed another workaround called Delivery Duty Paid or DDP shipping. In this scenario, the supplier would handle getting the goods through customs, rather than the U.S. brand, and lie about the value of the shipment essentially on the brand’s behalf. The goal of this, at least in part, would be to create an artificial buffer between the U.S. seller and customs.

“Some have mentioned that they are doing this already for many of our competitors,” the founder of the household goods brand told Fortune. He requested anonymity to speak freely about the situation and to not burn long-time suppliers whose manufacturing he may still need. One of his suppliers said in a message viewed by Fortune that some China-based Amazon sellers use the same strategies to lower their custom bills.

This sort of low-level fraud has been going on for a long time, and now Trump's tariffs are pouring oil on the fire.

Many U.S.-based Amazon sellers have long complained to this reporter that they suspect some of their China-based rivals undervalue their imports as a cost-savings tactic. Then, this week, the issue exploded into public view across the Amazon seller community when a China-based consultant
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about the current mindset of Chinese Amazon sellers, and stated that “the declared value of goods in a typical container from China to the U.S. usually ranges from $5,000 to $10,000.” Many U.S. Amazon sellers told Fortune that the number is unbelievably low, especially for the home and garden category, which includes furniture products, that the consultant operates in.

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tokenanalyst

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The irony that those are US companies not directly Chinese companies. Thanks to stooges in D.C. Chinese companies are not as exposed to the US market. Huawei doesn't sell smartphones there anymore, the EV market share of Chinese companies in the US is almost not existent, only 4% of Chinese made ICs are sold in the US and so on.
Service companies like bytedance and tencent may have some bigger share but also US has a service surplus with China.
 
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