China announced on Wednesday the world’s largest trade surplus ever, even adjusting for inflation, as a tsunami of exports flooded markets around the world last year.
China’s surplus, the value of goods and services it sold abroad versus its imports, reached $1.19 trillion, an increase of 20 percent from 2024, according to data released by the country’s General Administration of Customs. The number had already exceeded $1 trillion through November.
The country’s surplus is still widening: for December alone, China’s surplus reached $114.14 billion. It was the third-highest monthly surplus on record, trailing only January and June last year.
The enormous trade surplus for the full year came despite efforts by President Trump to use tariffs to contain China’s factories. The tariffs reduced China’s trade surplus with the United States. But Chinese factories increased sales to other regions, in many cases bypassing U.S. tariffs by shipping goods to the United States through Southeast Asia and elsewhere.
Also driving up China’s surplus in trade was the country’s chronic weakness in imports. Beijing’s leaders have pursued an ambitious industrial policy to replace imports with domestic production. Their goal has been to build national self-reliance in many industrial sectors.
China reaffirmed its self-reliance goals in October when it unveiled an initial sketch of its five-year plan for the economy through 2030.
At the same time, the spending power of many Chinese families to buy imported cars, cosmetics and other products has withered, and their purchases of domestically produced goods have faltered as well. Since 2021, a housing market crash has erased the life savings of many Chinese who had invested in property, leaving them with little ability to buy the flood of goods pouring out of the country’s factories.
Much of those products are exported instead.
China’s trade surplus has also been propelled by a weak currency, which makes the country’s goods less expensive in foreign markets and its imports more expensive. The government allowed the currency, the renminbi, to weaken considerably during the Covid-19 pandemic and has barely allowed it to recover since then, although there has been a slight rebound in the past several weeks.
Inflation in the West has made China’s exports even more appealing in foreign markets. China suffers from deflation, a broad drop in prices prompted by widespread factory overcapacity combined with weak domestic demand.
China’s trade surplus has expanded in many parts of the world. The European Union and some of the larger developing countries, such as Indonesia and India, have enacted targeted tariffs on specific categories of Chinese goods, but not the broad measures that Mr. Trump took last year.
China’s exports have grown particularly rapidly to Southeast Asia and Africa. Many companies in these regions, including subsidiaries of Chinese businesses, assemble components from China and then ship them to the United States, bypassing recently imposed American tariffs.
China has not run a trade deficit since 1993. Its 2025 trade surplus far exceeds earlier records around the world even when adjusted for inflation.
Japan’s surplus, for example, peaked in 1993 at $96 billion. That works out to $214 billion in today’s dollars, or less than a fifth of China’s surplus last year.
Germany ran huge trade surpluses in the years after Europe’s financial crisis a decade ago. But its surplus peaked in 2017 at a sum equal to $364 billion in today’s money.
China trade surplus in manufactured goods now exceeds a 10th of the country’s entire economic output. That imbalance has created millions of jobs in China but has also led to factory closings and layoffs in other countries.
After China’s trade surplus pushed past $1 trillion in the first 11 months of last year, Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warned at a news conference in Beijing last month that China should allow its currency to strengthen and rely more on domestic consumer spending instead of ever-rising exports.
“As the second-largest economy in the world, China is simply too big to generate much growth from exports, and continuing to depend on export-led growth risks furthering global trade tensions,” she said.
China has been wary of allowing its currency to appreciate significantly, however. The many jobs in export factories are cushioning the broad harm to the economy from the bursting of the country’s housing market, with apartment prices that continue to decline steeply.
Keith Bradsher is the Beijing bureau chief for The Times. He previously served as bureau chief in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Detroit and as a Washington correspondent. He lived and reported in mainland China through the pandemic.
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