What happens if export growth falters?

That’s a question Chinese officials — and particularly Beijing’s economic planners — would rather not ponder. Just about the only thing China’s beleaguered economy has going for it is exports, which’ve been strong. Suddenly, even that pillar looks wobbly.

Shipments abroad grew just 2.4% last month, data released on Monday showed. That was nowhere near consensus, and represented a marked downshift from August’s pace. In fact, last month’s increase was the smallest since May.

You know the narrative. Or at least you should. China’s trying to offset weak domestic demand by exporting a manufactured surplus. You can take “manufactured” figuratively and literally there. Literally in the sense that China’s the “world’s factory.” Figuratively in the sense that critics say China’s “manufacturing” (“engineering,” etc.) a surplus — Xi’s deliberately producing more than the Chinese economy can absorb and foisting that overcapacity on the rest of the world as a tsunami of cheap goods.

Some experts say that isn’t true. Or that even if it is, it’s oversimplified to the point of caricature and has by now become something of a nefarious canard amenable to weaponization by Western politicians looking for an excuse to “blame China.” I don’t disagree necessarily, but there’s only so much time in a day. Everything admits of complexity when you drill down. The risk is that in simplifying this particular complex dynamic, we stumble into economic nationalism, protectionism and xenophobia. Indeed, we already have.

At the same time, we shouldn’t be obtuse: The West can’t trust China’s leadership to play by any sort of international trade rules. The Chinese economic model is fundamentally different from the Western model. It’s apples to oranges. The West thought that through WTO accession and other “carrots,” it could turn apples to apples. That was misguided. In fact, it was one of the most consequential miscalculations in modern history on several vectors.

If you want to explain the popularity of the “blame China” narrative in America, the figure above’s a good place to start. And “blame China” was one ingredient in Donald Trump’s secret 2016 sauce. (Don’t taste the sauce!)

China’s exports were buoyed recently by price cuts and, probably, by a pull-forward effect as China’s trade partners endeavored to stay ahead of both the holiday shopping season and tariffs. The EU’s engaged in a trade war with Beijing, they just don’t call it that because being Europeans, they’re polite. American policy towards Xi’s China will be adversarial whoever wins in November. If “tariff man” ends up back in the Oval, expect the same transactional schizophrenia: Ad hoc levies on Chinese products announced on Truth Social at 6:30 in the morning, and a bemused Xi wandering around Mar-a-Lago three months later trying to figure out what, exactly, Trump wants in exchange for lifting tariffs.

Monday’s trade data out of Beijing also underscored China’s domestic demand problem. Imports grew just 0.3% in September, among the weakest showings of 2024. There’s no demand domestically. The property crisis and the attendant wealth destruction decimated sentiment. So much so that Chinese have reportedly taken to calling Xi’s economy “the garbage time of history.”

Speaking of that, if things keep going the way they’re going geopolitically, the whole world’s in for some “garbage time.” The country-by-country breakdown of China’s September trade data was telling: Exports to regional economies like Taiwan, South Korea and Japan slipped, and shipments to the US and Europe decelerated. Exports to Russia, by contrast, rose nearly 17% to a new record.

That’s not a viable strategy for Xi. Really it isn’t.

I realize a lot of disillusioned Westerners are tempted by the siren song of geostrategic, macro counter-narrative — de-dollarization, “new blocs,” the “petroyuan,” BRICS expansion and so on. If that’s you, be cautious. Caveat emptor.

I’m the fiercest critic of US foreign policy you’re ever going to find. Although I can’t go into the details, suffice to say a lot of the folks parroting “new world order” counter-narrative on finance-focused social media, across the macro blogosphere and so on, are unwittingly recycling narratives I conjured from the depths of liquor bottles over a decade ago. I read some of that stuff and think, “You didn’t write that. I wrote that. Or, actually, Laphroaig wrote that holed up paranoid at Monarch on Ridge Hill in 2015. Or Deep Eddy Sweet Tea wrote that while sunbathing blissfully from a beach chair at an alligator observation deck on a coastal wildlife reserve in 2016.”

Lying’s profitable. But those are ill-gotten gains. The truth’s less lucrative, but you can’t put a price on being able to look yourself in the mirror. And the truth’s the same now as it was then: For all its many tragic flaws — and I can’t emphasize the word “tragic” enough in this context — the world order we’ve known since World War II is almost surely preferable to a bipolar world where China heads a de facto military alliance with Russia, North Korea and Iran. Such an eventuality would end poorly for everybody, including and especially the citizens of China, Russia and Iran. (I’d include North Koreans in there, except that it isn’t entirely clear how things could get any worse for them.)

According to Kyiv and Seoul, Kim Jong-Un recently sent “several thousand” North Korean troops to Russia, where they’re being trained, presumably for battle in the Donbas. Dmitry Peskov called reports of North Korea’s nascent involvement in the war “a hoax.” He said the same thing, or something similar anyway, in January and February of 2022 when the US warned the world that Vladimir Putin was set to invade Ukraine imminently.