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China\u2019s trade surpluses are beating all their historic records. Despite the stagnation of its national consumption, China is racking up trade surpluses in the way of 94 billion dollars per month. This good news is however not so good because the strong correlation between a nation\u2019s trade balance and its overall consumption.<\/p>\n
These enormous figures of China\u2019s in no way reflect the country\u2019s industrial power. The ballooning of its trade surplus, in reality, shows only the great difficulty it has in balancing out its economy and controlling its colossal amounts of debt. While China has nearly doubled its trade surplus in the space of two years, the reason for it is a simple mechanical one, with its exports having increased compared to its imports that have been in free fall due to dwindling national consumption. And while increased exports generally mean good news for a country on a macroeconomic level, China cannot and should not be excited over its excellent figures, because they are above all the symptom of persistent \u2013 endemic, even \u2013 income inequality amongst its population.<\/p>\n
At most, China\u2019s trade surpluses allow it to maintain production \u2013 and therefore to avoid layoffs \u2013 with a backdrop of debt that is only getting worse. China has now effectively reached a point where it can only control its spiralling debt with help from massive trade surpluses that have only come about due to its national consumption being in constant decline. The impasse that the leaders of China now find themselves at, after reaching the limits of their country\u2019s growth model, has forced them to adopt a strategy of double circulation, that being rising exports combined with \u2013 and complemented \u2013 by gross national demand being relaunched with gusto.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n However, no coherent plan has yet been adopted in this regard, and at this very moment China is suffering from a structural problem, that it also shares with the other great exporting nations like Japan and Germany. In fact, the country\u2019s competitiveness carries with it the germs of its own contradiction and of its own precariousness, because their exports are only competitive if their workers get paid as little as possible relative to their productivity. Nations that show, with pride and arrogance, chronic and long-term export surpluses are also those where social welfare and salaries are the lowest, when compared with those of their trade partners in any case. A huge player in the export game, China has clearly not escaped this macroeconomic madness that demands that its competitiveness comes off the back and at the expense of its workers who find themselves in peril with their purchasing power compromised. Countries as differing as Vietnam, China, Germany, and Japan therefore owe their exporting successes to the fact that a smaller proportion of their GDP is repaid to their population, their households, and their workforce. These champions of exportation are also all suffering from the same intrinsic weakness in their stagnant, even anaemic, consumption, due to a voluntarily deficient redistribution plan.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Even worse in China is the repartition of its GDP towards its citizens in the way of only 55%, whereas this number is 75% for households of Western countries. Hence, a second structural fault \u2013 a major one, this one \u2013 adding to this country\u2019s shocking inequalities is that the government is keeping 45% of national GDP for itself to reroute to companies and to local governments. Recovering China\u2019s consumption will therefore necessarily go through a decrease of subsidies granted to these two aforementioned actors, and notably those that have been gobbled up and mismanaged by the different provinces racking up some 5 trillion dollars of debt. As it would be difficult to withdraw this aid from the business world that has already been led astray by many resounding bankruptcies and other solvency problems, it is the local governments of China that must now expect to see a gradual drying up of Beijing\u2019s support, despite their debt having already rocketed up by 25% over two years.<\/p>\n China\u2019s financial stability finds itself fundamentally comprised. Hence the exhortations of \u201ccommon prosperity\u201d coming from the central authorities, pointing their finger \u201cin Chinese style\u201d at this squaring of the circle that they must urgently endeavour to solve, with all the political risks that come with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" China\u2019s trade surpluses are beating all their historic records. Despite the stagnation of its national consumption, China is racking up trade surpluses in the way of 94 billion dollars per month. This good news is however not so good because the strong correlation between a nation\u2019s trade balance and its overall consumption. These enormous…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":21920,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_crdt_document":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"mc4wp_mailchimp_campaign":[],"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[648941287,648941271,648941303],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-china","category-competitiveness","category-debt"],"yoast_head":"\n