Vandelay Industries had a solid month in September, trade data released on Monday suggested.

Indeed, if you didn’t know any better you might be inclined to suggest China doesn’t even need to sell directly into the US consumer market.

That’s a ridiculous exaggeration, but Beijing said shipments abroad expanded more than 8% YoY last month despite another huge drop in exports to America.

The 8.3% export gain was nearly two full percentage points better than the pace economists expected and counted as the briskest rate of annual expansion recorded in 2025 so far. That, even as exports to the US logged another enormous decline, falling 27% YoY.

Note that shipments to the US slumped double-digits every month since Donald Trump returned to office except one.

If you haven’t read “China Floods the World With Cheap Exports After Trump’s Tariffs” — a “feature-length” (if you will) Bloomberg piece published late last month — do yourself a favor when you have a few minutes. It’s a good piece, the gist of which is captured in the second paragraph (journalistic decorum says you don’t bury the lede; I’m allergic to decorum): Buyers in India purchased a record amount from China in August, while shipments to Africa are likewise robust and sales to Southeast Asia are now higher than they were prior to the pandemic.

In short: China’s making up for the slump in trade with the US — and then some. Monday’s data showed Xi Jinping’s trade balance rose double-digits for the month of September, when shipments to Europe and Southeast Asia both rose sharply. Naturally in the context of re-exports and transshipments, exports to Vietnam surged 25%. The bilateral surplus with the US widened MoM, a result attributable in part to an unofficial boycott of American soybeans. (“Our great farmers are winning like never before.”)

More notable than the strong showing for exports was a veritable surge in imports, which jumped more than 7%. Recall that Beijing’s struggling mightily to revive domestic demand. One place that struggle manifests is imports, which’ve been sluggish. Not in September, though. The 7.4% increase was the largest since April of 2024.

Beijing has an incentive to release strong data ahead of a possible face-to-face meeting between Trump and Xi next month in South Korea. Trump last week angrily suggested the meeting might not take place in light of new Chinese restrictions on rare earths. Following a terse response from Beijing on Sunday, he softened his tone, calling Xi “highly respected” and imploring investors not to worry about China.

A Party official on Monday described the geopolitical backdrop in familiar terms. In this case “familiar” means dire. “The current external environment remains grim and complex,” an apparatchik said. “Foreign trade faces rising uncertainty and difficulties.”

Trump was too busy stepping over dead Gazans on the way to regaling the Knesset to weigh in further on China Monday, but judging by the earliest trading on Wall Street, investors were more than happy to take his word for it when he insisted, in the same Sunday evening social media post, that “It will all be fine.”