That’s one conclusion you could draw from this table assembled by Caroline Freund of the Peterson Institute for International Economics:
So if we shut down trade with China, as the tariffs proposed by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump might do, there’d be no other country standing ready to supply us with our Christmas-decorating needs, rubber boots or wigs -- not to mention our laptop computers. As for mobile phones, the biggest U.S. import from China, they don’t make the Peterson Institute list because there are a few other countries that make significant numbers of them (including the U.S., which exported $10.5 billion worth of cell phones in 2015, according to the UN Comtrade database). But China is still pretty dominant.
So there are a few crucial, expensive products in which China dominates U.S. imports. There are also some much cheaper ones that are crucial if, say, you need lights for your Christmas tree, but that don’t seem all that economically significant. I was a little surprised, actually, at how heavy the Peterson Institute list is on things you might buy at Michael’s. This kind of low-value, low-margin manufacturing does not create many good jobs, and I thought China was moving beyond it.
When you look at a more conventional list of the biggest U.S. imports from China by dollar value, things are somewhat less surprising. This is from the U.S. Census Bureau, which uses different categories from those in the U.N. Comtrade database:
Some of the most valuable parts of those cell phones, computers and other tech products imported from China don’t actually come from China. The raw materials are sourced from around the world, while key components are made in the U.S., Japan, Taiwan and elsewhere. Trade is complicated, and it’s also not a zero-sum endeavor in which exports are always good and imports are always bad.Still, it is useful to know what trade flows look like. Here are the top ten U.S. exports to China:
Note that the dollar amounts are a lot smaller in this chart. With $502.6 billion in imports in 2015 and $116.2 billion in exports, according to the UN database, the U.S. continues to run a huge merchandise trade deficit with China. Is that a terrible thing? Not necessarily. It definitely seems to make Christmas more affordable than it would otherwise be.