Splash247: China’s $1trn trade surplus reshapes global container flows in 2025

China’s trade surplus has smashed through the $1trn mark in the first 11 months of 2025 – a record that underscores how dramatically global container flows have shifted this year, even as trade with the US slumps nearly 29%.

The headline figure, released by Chinese customs, highlights two simultaneous trends that have reshaped the global liner landscape: collapsing transpacific volumes to the US, and surging exports to emerging markets and non-traditional trade partners.

China-US liftings have been in structural decline throughout 2025, weighed down by Trump’s protectionism, near-shoring, inventory corrections, and a wave of trade-diversion strategies among American importers. Yet the shortfall has been more than offset by booming demand from Latin America, the Middle East, Russia-adjacent markets, and parts of Africa and South Asia.

Operators on the Asia to Latin America, Middle East and Africa trades have experienced double-digit volume growth this year, prompting a string of service upgrades, extra-loaders and cascading of larger tonnage. 

“Traditional trade patterns are being rewritten as China redirects exports from tariff-impacted US markets toward Europe (+10-15%), Africa (+20-25%), and intra-Asian lanes (+6-8%), while emerging markets-led by India, Philippines, and East Africa-accelerate their rise,” noted a new report from Vizion, an American container tracking platform. 

Faced with US tariff barriers, Chinese exporters executed what Vizion described as “a remarkable geographic pivot” in 2025. Vizion data shows US-bound bookings from China are down 8-12% this year compared to 2024, while Europe-bound bookings are up by 10-15%, Africa-bound bookings are up a remarkable 20-25%, while ASEAN-bound bookings are up 6-8%. 

Looking at the trade surplus news, Lars Jensen, one of the world’s most famous experts on container shipping, told Splash: “It basically tells us that China has been quite capable of ramping up their sales to other markets in the face of the US trade war. It is also reflected in container volumes, which have seen growing more than usual in many non-US trades during 2025.”

Peter Sand, chief analyst at Xeneta, a container freight rate platform, said: “China has really been flexing it’s trade muscle in 2025, showing the results of what’s been in the making for a decade – finding long term options to its traditional, yet past-peak consuming destination for manufactured exports, something that has been fast forwarded by the US-China trade war. No other shipping sector has seen this shift more clearly than container shipping.”

To cater for this shift, Sand said carriers have been agile to rejig services and capacity.

“It’s more complex than ever before to grasp the whereabouts of global container shipping networks,” Sand told Splash.

Writing for Splash earlier this year, Neil Shearing, group chief economist at Capital Economics, and author of this year’s bestseller The Fractured Age, suggested that globalisation is not ending, but patterns of global trade are being redrawn. 

“Identifying where the faultlines of this fracturing will lie – and therefore which industries and shipping routes will be most affected – will be critical,” Shearing wrote, adding: “My base case is that it will be contained primarily to strategically important sectors – think phones, batteries, chips, pharmaceuticals and dual-purpose goods like drones. What’s more, I suspect that where manufacturing is relocated out of China it will shift to another low-cost country. Accordingly, the overall effect may be more, not less, shipping demand – especially if new routes lengthen voyage times.”

What the record surplus ultimately shows is not a contraction in Chinese export power, but a dramatic re-wiring of global container trades. China’s boxes are travelling farther, on different lanes, to a broader mix of customers.