Opinion | The East is rising amid the great progress of China's export

By Edward Hei Leung, DAB Standing Committee Member

Despite repeated COVID-19 outbreaks, China's economy thrives continuously, together with the latest figures on its foreign trade expansion. According to the data from the General Administration of Customs, the value of imports and exports attended a record high at $530.3 billion this year. That is to say, China has proven its robust economy, strong labor market, supportive manufacturing network and more importantly, scientific epidemic control.

COVID-19 hits western societies heavily

On contrary to China, US seemingly has a dim future ahead. As to Gallup's latest survey in August, 60% of respondents believes that the economy is worsening in comparison with 54% in July. Besides, the country's August jobs report is definitely weak, given only 235,000 jobs added into the domestic economy. Undoubtedly, it falls short of the expert' forecast for a gain of 733,000 in a Bloomberg survey.

Worse still, Goldman Sachs economists recently downgraded their projection for US's economic growth to 5.7% annually. In fact, the estimation is a little bit higher than my expectation, especially when we notice that the country's economy contracted by 3.4% last year. Yet, with the resurgence of virus, namely Delta variant, not to mention the possible discontinuities of fiscal support, can US's economy fulfil this targeted growth?

Let us take a look on UK, the so-called friendly neighbor to the Americans. Unlike US, the nation has shown a 4.8% rise, due to the previous easing of coronavirus restrictions. However, in accordance with COVID-19 figures from the New York Times, UK has got an average of 38,705 cases per day in the last week. Besides, the number of positive cases has increased by 14 percent from the average two weeks ago, meanwhile the death toll also increased by 34 percent. More importantly, the deadly Mu variant of coronavirus has been found in Wales. Under all these circumstances, would it be too difficult for UK to prevent GDP contraction in the third quarter of 2021?

The world-largest factory grows its influence amid COVID-19

Famous of its Made-in-China brand, China is the world-largest manufacturer. Even though faced with a series of COVID-19 outbreaks, factories in the territory seems to be operating well under the effective disease control measures. It can be proven by the shipment breakdown in which a broad-based uptick is found across all goods types, including electronics, furniture and recreational products etc. Thanks to the strong global demand, China has the surprisingly strong exports in August, and foreign experts like Louis Kuijs, the head of Asia economics at Oxford Economics, believes that the global economic recovery will continue to underpin China's export in late 2021, and contribute to the GDP growth thereof.

To me, the latest strong demand reflects two interesting phenomena. First and the foremost, it proves the success of China's zero-tolerance principle when handling with COVID-19 cases. As mentioned in my previous article, the side effects of zero-tolerance, though costly, are at least measurable in comparison with the so-called live-with-virus strategy. Aside from this, it also implies that in 2021, ASEAN not only becomes China's largest trading partner, but also continuously increase, and account for 14.5 percent of China's total foreign trade value now. Even though US eagerly confines our motherland, the country's enterprises have successfully found alternatives to substitute their US partners.

Xi Jinping, our country's leader, previously named the current international relations as "the East is rising". It cannot be doubted that China's international status, both political and economic, has kept rising under his leadership. The country's effective disease control, accompanied by on-going factory operations and strong global demand on Chinese-made goods, will drive the country to another great success, and the notion of the East is rising" may happen earlier than western world expects.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.