AI theme (and gold) drive China’s imports, shedding light on economic transformation

China’s imports shed light on its export successes. Rising shipments of “intermediate goods” show how some of the country’s most successful companies are embedded in the global AI ecosystem.

Splitting China’s total imports into AI-exposed goods and everything else reveals a divergence: cross-border demand for semiconductors, computers and other critical inputs is pulling away sharply. (Our basket of goods focuses on computing, storage and networking hardware, processors and memory chips, and semiconductor manufacturing.)

Our basket (a subset of the World Trade Organization‘s list of AI-exposed industries) contributed almost half of China’s recent import growth. Meanwhile, energy imports – a category more tied to the domestic economy – is still down in value terms year-on-year, even with price spikes and the Middle East supply shock.