China Hits Record 40% of Global Container Exports Despite Trump Tariffs

China now accounts for 40% of the world's container exports on a rolling three-month basis — its highest level on record and a 2.5 percentage-point increase from nine months ago, Jens Eskelund, president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, told the Financial Times on Tuesday.

The figure undercuts the core premise of the Trump administration's tariff strategy. Import taxes designed to punish Chinese firms have instead shut them out of parts of the U.S. market and pushed them to sell elsewhere, economists and policy experts said.

For Europe, the swelling Chinese share of global shipments signals a widening trade imbalance between the continents, Eskelund warned. Cheaper Chinese goods flood European markets, squeeze out European manufacturers, and erode the continent's share of global exports while China sells at low prices elsewhere.

The U.S. faces a similar dynamic, echoing the "China Shock" of the early 2000s — the surge of Chinese products on American shelves after Beijing joined the World Trade Organization, which throttled U.S. manufacturing and left parts of America with heavy job losses and stagnant wages. Economists predict the impending "China Shock 2.0" will reach beyond retail into technology such as AI infrastructure and electric vehicles.

"China really is becoming the workshop of the world," Jeremi Suri, a public affairs and history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told Fortune. "And what that means is that almost every global economy is one way or another dependent on China."

Suri places much of the blame for the recent shift on Washington's own trade policy. "The tariff policies of the last two years have been an unmitigated disaster," he said. "They have made exactly what we're talking about worse for the United States."

President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet for a two-day summit beginning Wednesday.

How tariffs accelerated the shift

Part of China's rise stems from a decades-long arc. The U.S. began moving from a manufacturing economy to a service economy in the 1950s. China ended its isolationist policies in the 1970s and cemented its role in global trade when it joined the WTO 25 years ago. An undervalued currency lets Chinese firms charge up to 30% less than other countries to export goods, feeding a glut of production sold overseas.

Tariffs amplified the export push, according to the analysis. The levies blocked Chinese exporters from parts of the U.S. market, forcing them to find buyers elsewhere. They also encouraged transshipment — a tariff-dodging practice in which China exports intermediate parts to lower-tariff countries for assembly and resale to the U.S. with reduced import taxes.

Last month the White House released a report estimating the U.S. lost between $19 billion and $26 billion in tax revenue from transshipments, with China as the primary culprit. The administration has also broadened the definition of transshipments to include goods linked to China or where China plays any role in a product's supply chain.

Suri expects China's branching out to continue — not only to evade tariffs, but because U.S. trade policy has damaged America's credibility as a reliable partner. "We use trade for power, but we can't presume that those levers will be as meaningful going forward," he said. "With tariffs, we're pushing countries further away more quickly."

Not necessarily a clean win for Beijing

The record shipping share does not automatically make China the tariff war's winner. Andrew Greenland, an economics professor at North Carolina State University who specializes in U.S. tariff policy, noted that transshipments and diversions are responses to shifting trade conditions, not necessarily a net increase in China's share of global trade.

"I'm not saying that China isn't growing in prominence," Greenland told Fortune. "But the fact that they're showing up as having more shipments, for example, could be consistent with any of those mechanisms."

Nothing prohibited China from diversifying trading partners or using transshipments before the tariffs, Greenland argued. The changes in shipping behavior are, in his view, "got to be an adjustment that's not necessarily making things better" for China.

Asked whether China's success in finding new export markets — given a less stable U.S. business partner — benefits Beijing in the long run, Greenland was blunt.

"Yeah," he said. "It's good that they've been able to find places to send things that have not just meant sitting on excess supply."

If tariffs keep eroding U.S. trade relationships, China's newly diversified export networks could position it as an even greater trade power in the years ahead.