BEIJING: Trade between China and the US continued an upward trend in the past four months, official data showed, highlighting inseparable economic relations between the two countries, although a political chill still exists.
In the first four months of the year, China’s trade with the US rose 50.3 percent year-on-year to 1.44 trillion yuan ($222.8 billion), making the US its third largest trading partner after the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and EU economies, according to data from the General Administration of Customs on Friday.
China’s exports to the US rose 49.3 percent while imports gained 53.3 percent, and the trade surplus with the US was 653.89 billion yuan, an increase of 47 percent.
Although growth slowed a little bit compared to the two countries’ trade rise in the first three months of this year, it is still “under expectation” in the eyes of several Chinese economists, who stressed that it shows that China is still in a stable position to implement the China-US phase one trade deal. The large increase in imports and exports between China and the US shows that both sides have demand, Tian Yun, vice director of the Beijing Economic Operation Association, told the Global Times, adding that China is implementing the China-US phase one trade deal, but China will increase demand accordingly, instead of blindly expanding imports to the US.
He said China-US relations will be in a state of “political chill and economic heat” this year, and the balance of trade between China and the US requires the US to liberalize rather than restrict exports to China.
The growing surplus shows that the reason cited by the former Trump administration to collect tariffs from China is “groundless,” Gao Lingyun, a trade expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, who closely follows China-US trade issues, told the Global Times on Friday.
He said the widening data is in contrast with US ambitions to reduce the gap — one of the key motivations for former US president Donald Trump to launch the trade war with China.
– The Daily Mail-Global Times News exchange item
