Milestone set to be reached

China may soon be named the world's largest trader in goods

Even as China faced huge economic challenges last year, it may have knocked the US off its perch as the world's largest goods trading nation.

Whether that happened will become clear when the US publishes figures for December soon, but earlier figures pointed strongly in that direction.

Until recently China has been the world's largest exporter of goods and the second largest importer of goods.

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Last year, combined exports and imports rose 7.6 percent to $4.16 trillion, the General Administration of Customs says. Exports were worth $2.21 trillion, 7.9 percent higher than the year before. Imports were worth $1.95 trillion, 7.3 percent higher than the previous year, giving China a trade surplus of $259.7 billion.

The government has been on a mission to improve the quality of the country's overseas trade and the way it is conducted. Zheng Yuesheng, a spokesman for the customs administration, says that an economic warming-up in China's big export markets has contributed to last year's strong figures.

In the first 10 months of the year the combined value of China's exports and imports exceeded that of the US by $192 billion. The pace of growth outstripped that of the US by 7 percentage points, Zheng says.

"The value of US exports and imports rose less than 1 percent in the first 11 months. On those figures, it's all but certain that China overtook the US to become the world's largest goods trader."

The value of US exports and imports in the 11 months to November was $3.59 trillion, about $570 billion less than the corresponding figure for China. The average monthly value of US trade in the 11 months was $326 billion.

The value of China's exports and imports exceeding $4 trillion last year was a milestone, Zheng says, $1 trillion having been exceeded in 2004, $2 trillion exceeded in 2007 and $3 trillion in 2011.

However, overall growth in trade last year failed to reach the government's target of 8 percent, the Ministry of Commerce says. In 2012, China's trade grew 6.2 percent; the government's target had been 10 percent.

Zhang Yiping, a researcher with China Merchants Securities Co Ltd, says the failure to meet the 8 percent target last year was "mainly owing to the unsatisfactory performance of imports".

But on the whole, "exports were not bad", Zhang says. "In emerging economies there was stronger demand for Chinese exports, while in the US and the European Union demand weakened."