Foreign exports of manufactures to China fall 12% by volume since 2022

KUALA LUMPUR, 11 OCTOBER 2026 —

The debate over China Shock 2.0 has concentrated on the expansion of Chinese manufactured exports and the implications of China's US$1.2 trillion trade surplus in 2025.

Much less attention has been paid to what manufactures China is buying from the rest of the world. This matters because concerns that foreign firms are losing sales in China are often supported by individual examples rather than systematic evidence.

Has the quantity of manufactured goods that China buys from foreign suppliers fallen since 2022, and if so, how widespread has that decline been? The principal contribution of this analysis is to assemble volume-based evidence on these outcomes, essentially shifting the focus away from the total value of Chinese imports that is affected by price changes.

Volume is the appropriate measure for the matter before us because import values reflect both the quantity of goods purchased and the prices paid for them. For current purposes, this analysis constructs monthly volume measures for individual six-digit product categories of manufactured goods and combines them in a Törnqvist index, which gives greater weight to products that account for larger shares of import expenditure.

Manufactures are defined as HS chapters 28 to 96 excluding chapter 71. The principal comparison uses January to August in both 2022 and 2026 so that the same months are compared. The detailed construction of the data and indices is reported in Box 1. [1] Figure 1 provides the starting point.

When all imports are considered (manufactured and other), China's total import volume in January to August 2026 remained close to its 2022 level, even though the value of imports in current US dollars was substantially higher. Figure 2 reveals the importance of separating out Chinese imports of manufactured goods from other goods.

The volume of manufactured imports in January to August 2026 was 12.3% below the level recorded in the same months of 2022, while the volume of non-manufactured imports increased by about 15%. China has therefore not experienced a comparable contraction in imports across all goods. The principal change has been in the composition of what China buys from abroad, with foreign sales of manufactures falling markedly.

The contraction in manufactures import volume occurred early and persisted. Figure 2 shows that the manufactured import volume index fell sharply between 2022 and 2023. When January to August is compared in each year, the index moved from 100.9 in 2022 to 89.9 in 2023. It then recorded 90.8 in 2024, 90.0 in 2025 and 88.5 in 2026.

Roughly nine-tenths of the cumulative fall had therefore occurred by 2023 and the lost ground was not subsequently recovered. The aggregate decline is not the product of a few exceptional goods. Figure 3 recalculates the manufactured import volume index after removing the 25, 50, 100 and 250 HS6 products that made the largest positive or negative contributions to the change in the aggregate import volume index. Every case shows a substantial decline.

Excluding the 25 most influential products produces a larger fall than the headline index shows because several of the largest individual contributions were positive. Figure 4 confirms that the movement is dispersed across many products. The top 25 products account for only 37% of the total absolute movement across product lines, while the top 100 account for 63%.

Therefore, the contraction in Chinese manufactured import volumes remains visible even after the most influential products are removed. Figure 5 provides a different test of breadth by examining the distribution of changes across individual manufactured products. About 67% of the HS6 products in the comparison recorded lower import volumes between January to August 2022 and the same months of 2026. These declining products also represented about two-thirds of the import value.

The median change across products was a fall of about 24%. When products are weighted according to their importance in import value, the median fall was about 13%. The difference between the two measures indicates that smaller product lines generally contracted more sharply than larger ones. The decline was therefore widespread, but its severity differed across imported manufactures. Broad-based reductions do not mean uniform cuts.

Figures 3 to 5 establish that the decline extends well beyond a handful of products and affects a large share of China's manufactured imports. They do not imply that every part of manufacturing has moved in the same direction or by the same amount. Some sectors and products have experienced very large contractions, others have changed little, and some have expanded substantially.

This variation matters commercially because firms and exporting countries are exposed to different parts of the Chinese market. It also matters for policy because an aggregate decline can coexist with significant areas of continuing foreign opportunity. In short, China’s trading partners may view differently its aggregate decline in sourcing manufactures from abroad. The next step is therefore to identify where the contraction has been concentrated and where imports have continued to grow.

Figure 6 shows substantial differences across the 20 largest manufacturing chapters. Between January to August 2022 and the same months of 2026, import volume fell by about 54% for vehicles, 28% for plastics, 14% for machinery and 11% for electrical equipment. Other major chapters moved in the opposite direction. Import volume for nickel and articles thereof rose by about 91%, while inorganic chemicals increased by about 52%.

For firms and trading partners, the composition of what they sell to China is consequently central to their commercial exposure. Figure 7 shows why the sharp rise in nominal import value in 2026 does not overturn this conclusion. Between January to August 2022 and the same months of 2026, the value of manufactured imports rose by 16.9% even though the volume index fell by 12.3%.

The increase in value was more than accounted for by computing products, whose imports rose from US$317 billion to US$557 billion. Memory chips alone added US$147 billion to a net increase of US$183 billion in manufactured import value.