Trade figures confirm China’s world status
Print Edition
CHINA’S trade grew 3.4 percent from a year earlier to US$4.3 trillion in 2014, cementing its status as the world’s largest trading nation, the General Administration of Customs said yesterday.
The country’s trade surplus shot to a record high of US$382.4 billion last year, or 2.35 trillion yuan, up 45.9 percent year on year.
Zheng Yuesheng, a Customs spokesman, said that although it was the third straight year that China had missed its trade growth target of 7.5 percent, the performance was positive with better goods structure and more diversified trading partners.
“The failure to meet the target is due to a couple of complicated reasons, including sluggish foreign demand, the condition that China is amidst a transition period and its state of new normal,” Zheng said. “With recovering world economies, we expect this year’s trade will be better than that in 2014.”
Referring to the trade surplus, Zheng said China is aiming to keep a balance between exports and imports.
“The sharp declines in commodity prices and frail domestic demand have led to weak imports in 2014, which in part landed such a strong surplus,” Zheng said.
Last year, China’s exports rose 6.1 percent to US$2.34 trillion, while imports edged up 0.4 percent to US$1.96 trillion.
Imports continued to underperform in December.
The official figures showed imports lost 2.4 percent last month, compared with November’s drop of 6.7 percent. Exports gained 9.7 percent, more than double November’s 4.7 percent rise.
Zhou Hao, an economist at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd, said the falling prices of commodities, especially of energy, explained the weak imports and growing surplus.
“In volume terms, Chinese crude oil imports grew 13.4 percent in December, indicating Chinese oil companies intended to take advantage of low prices to raise reserves,” Zhou said.
“Despite the large trade surplus, the Chinese yuan depreciated only by about 3 percent in 2014 ... we believe it is not in the central bank’s interest to see the yuan weaken significantly as it could trigger large capital outflow, which in turn endangers financial stability,” Zhou said.
Wang Tao, an economist at UBS, also expected the yuan to depreciate slightly this year to counter the effect of other weakening currencies.
The European Union, the United States and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations were China’s top three trading partners last year, the Customs said.
Compared with the US, whose trade rose 3.3 percent in the first 10 months, and Japan, which saw its trade lose 1.4 percent in the same period, China remained a star performer in terms of exports and imports, according to the Customs.
China is to release other 2014 data as well as the gross domestic product figure next Tuesday.
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