China’s trade surplus in goods continues to rise and now dwarfs the heights for Germany and Japan during their exporting heydays in the 1990s. “Over the past six years, China’s imports of such goods increased by an average of only $15 billion a year, essentially no change at all when inflation is taken into account,” writes Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Its manufactured exports, on the other hand, have grown more than 10 times as fast, by over $150 billion a year. When it comes to manufactured goods, trade with China is virtually a one-way street.”
