Brasil e China no Reordenamento das Relações ... - Funag

albert keidel
Figure 4. CPI inflation – Official year-on-year & Month-onmonth
(Seasonally Adjusted and Un-adjusted)
Sources: China NBS (see Figure 2), with author’s calculations.
In foreign trade, the concerns are quite different. A continuing large
trade surplus for China invites criticism that China’s surplus is the result
of its exchange rate, or its industrial policy, or its protectionist positions.
Such criticisms strengthen the hand of politicians in developed countries
who want to get elected on a protectionist platform that promises to
penalize China for its “unfair” trade policies.
Figure 5 presents China’s trade record over the past ten years illustrates
important features of China’s foreign trade experience. Up to the middle of
2004, China’s trade surplus of about 30 billion U.S. dollars was quite small
for a several-trillion-dollar-GDP economy, and extremely small compared
to the U.S. trade deficit at that time, which was more than a half-trillion
dollars in 2004. Conditions setting the stage for the U.S. financial crisis
were all in place by 2004, especially the sub-prime mortgages and inflated
U.S. housing prices. But China’s trade surplus clearly had nothing to do
with this growth in U.S. liquidity and lending abuses.
Figure 5 also shows that despite the small surplus early in the 2000s,
Chinese trade was growing quite rapidly. The export and import lines in
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