When it comes to estimating the health of China’s economy, including its exports, most Western political and economic pundits tend to look at Chinese trade and economic relations with the West (the US and the EU) mainly. In making these assessments, these pundits quite often ignore China’s trade ties with the ‘Global South’ (ASEAN, South Asia, Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, Latin America, etc.) and the impact this trade has on the growth of China’s political and economic influence worldwide.

Such wrong estimates are often at the heart of analysis that often see China’s economic fortunes going from “bad to worse” and facing a serious “downturn”. To some extent, a key reason why these analyses ignore trade with the ‘Global South’ is that China, until recently, was not a major economic player in this specific economic region of developing and under-developed countries. But this is no longer the case.

Trade Growth with the Global South

As the latest figures show, China’s trade with the ‘Global South’ is more than its trade with the ‘Global North’. Today, its monthly export to the ‘Global South’ is US$150 billion, up from US$90 billion in 2020. The surge coincides with the tariffs Washington began to impose on Chinese exports to the US after 2016. The cardinal purpose of these tariffs – and subsequent restrictions imposed by both the Trump and the Biden administration on the export of technology to China – was to forcibly restrict the........

© New Eastern Outlook