China's trade model is built on keeping others poor

Yet for workers and companies across the developing world, the possibility of a return to a status quo ante isn't an entirely comforting notion, either. A new normal that preserves China's dominance of global trade hurts them far more than it does the U.S. or other Western nations.

A new index from Bloomberg Intelligence that examines the export potential of various major economies explains why. China is still at the top of the table, and there's a big gap between it and the closest competitor, India. Most emerging markets, according to the index, only marginally outperform developed economies.

This is not how it's supposed to go. As labor costs in China converge with higher-productivity markets, it should look like a less attractive source of goods. Trade-driven sectors should start moving out of the country — or, in the index's terms, other developing economies should demonstrate greater or at least comparable export potential.

Instead, China's lead in other factors — from energy costs and logistics efficiency to straightforward technical know-how — is so great that it still has no peers.

It's impossible to overstate how unusual this is in world history. Various countries and regions have had their moment dominating world trade — Britain, the U.S., Japan — before stepping aside and letting others grow. As they became richer, they moved to different slots in the supply chain, allowing lower-value goods to be made in places with reduced costs.

China, instead, continues to dominate every rung of the supply chain, from low- to high-margin manufacturing. According to calculations by the economists Arvind Subramanian and Shoumitro Chatterjee, three-quarters of the country's enormous trade surplus with the world continues to come from goods that are manufactured using relatively basic skills, and it still has over half the global market share in such sectors.

Other estimates, with a more restrictive definition of low-skills production, come out a little smaller: Harvard's Gordon Hanson assessed in 2020 that China's share of labor-intensive manufacturing was about one-third.

Either way, this is an anomaly. This market share doesn't fit with the other things we know about that economy — that its working-age population is declining, and average wages are now several times those in its struggling competitors.

There could be several reasons for the emergence of this inconsistency. A persistently undervalued currency could account for it, as could hidden subsidies for inputs like energy.

But part of the reason is that Beijing has deliberately intervened in the natural process of global development. Because the corollary of one country's economy growing and a second, poorer peer overtaking it in terms of export potential is that the savers, investors and corporations of the first country start moving capital and technology to the second.

This is how manufacturing spread across the developed world and the Asian tigers. In the heyday of British economic hegemony, London's bankers financed half of the world's foreign investment. A large proportion of American railroad bonds were denominated in sterling. By the time the U.S. dominated trade a century later, it in turn was the origin of almost half of outward investment globally. And during its boom years in the 1980s, Japan's share of world investment overtook America's.

This is what happens when companies in trade-surplus nations are allowed to freely plan for the future and find the best returns on their capital. That isn't how Beijing allows its economy to work, however. What it earns from trade is directed instead at creating excess capacity at home, or toward long-gestation projects meant to further embed China at the center of global manufacturing.

This means that Chinese companies get a low return on their savings, and its savers and pensioners are poorer than they should be. But it also means that workers throughout the rest of the developing world are cut off from their potential. They need Chinese companies to use their technological skills and hoarded capital to build factories that would train and employ them.

But China's leaders aren't allowing that to happen. They want to stay at the top of that export potential table, and don't care if, as a consequence, the developing world is deprived of its destiny. If Beijing has its way, nobody else will ever get rich.

Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, he is author of "Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy."

(COMMENT, BELOW)

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