Asia Times has published articles on China’s shift of its export trade to the Global South since 2018-19, which U.S. officials call “industrial overcapacity” because China has expanded and advanced its manufacturing capacities as the Trump and Biden Administrations tried to destroy them. The latest from Asia Times by David Goldman on May 21, quantifies the shift with charts.
Since 2020 China’s exports to the Global South have risen from $90 billion/month to $150 billion/month, nearly $2 trillion/year. Roughly half of that $60 billion/month rise in exports, he estimates, comes from China having extended its industrial supply chains into developing countries. In the case of the United States, for example, many of China’s goods exports are now produced in Mexico. The other half of the shift, he assigns to those exports which, for the most part, provide capital goods to developing countries as extensions of the Belt and Road Initiative. They are in the sectors of transportation infrastructure, electronic equipment, digital infrastructure, solar panels and electric vehicles—the sectors about which Janet Yellen and others hyperventilate, and call “exported manufacturing overcapacity.”
