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Zhou Xiaoming
Opinion
Zhou Xiaoming

China’s exports feed the Global South’s industrial engines

Far from stifling development, China’s export portfolio indicates a positive-sum diffusion of industrial growth

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Illustration: Kaliz Lee
Zhou Xiaoming
Zhou Xiaoming is a senior fellow at the Centre for China and Globalisation in Beijing and a former deputy representative of China’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations Office in Geneva.

A scaremongering narrative has taken root in Western corridors and financial press columns: China, having saturated developed markets, is now aiming to crush fragile industries in developing nations, effectively slamming the door on their industrial dreams. It is a convenient little tale. However, it does not hold up against empirical evidence.

The premise assumes that China and the Global South are fighting over the same slice of the global consumption pie – cheap T-shirts, plastic sandals, toys. However, China’s export basket has changed. The share of intermediate goods, such as components and semi-finished products for downstream manufacturing, rose from roughly 42 per cent in 2017 to about 46 per cent by 2023.

Over the same period, the share of consumer goods fell from about 36 per cent to roughly 33 per cent while the share of capital goods held steady at around 20 per cent. This is not the cargo manifest of a predator hunting for sneaker shelf-space. It is the supply list of a systemic partner that is feeding other nations’ industrial engines.

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