Goldman Sachs said China’s export growth is increasingly driven by demand from markets outside the United States, with non-U.S. buyers now accounting for more than 85% of China’s total exports. According to the investment bank’s economists, Chinese export volumes will grow 5% to 6% annually in the coming years. This pace, they say, is reshaping global trade patterns well beyond the direct effects of U.S. tariffs.
The findings come as China’s exports have proven resilient through 2025 despite elevated U.S. tariffs, with real export growth on track to reach roughly 8% for the full year. Goldman’s research describes a structural shift rather than a temporary one, with Chinese goods increasingly redirected toward emerging markets, Southeast Asia and the European Union.
This has raised questions about how competing economies, including Europe and Japan, will absorb the spillover, and signals that China’s trade trajectory is now largely decoupled from the U.S.-China tariff relationship alone.
Goldman’s Core Finding
Chinese exports to markets outside the United States, which Goldman Sachs Research estimates make up more than 85% of China’s total exports, are on track for modest but steady growth even though the direct US-China trade relationship remains strained.
In a research note, Goldman Sachs Research raised its forecast for China’s real GDP growth to 4.8% in 2026 and 4.7% in 2027, up from earlier estimates of 4.3% and 4.0%, citing resilient exports and eased trade tensions following an October meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Hui Shan, Goldman Sachs Research’s chief China economist, said the shift reflects a broader change in China’s negotiating position. “For the first time, China is positioned more as an equal,” Shan said, according to Goldman Sachs Research’s own reporting on the findings.
Where the Growth Is Coming From
Goldman’s economists point to three main drivers behind China’s export resilience. Firstly, rapid expansion into emerging-market economies, China’s dominance in critical minerals limiting other countries’ ability to impose significant trade barriers, and growing high-tech exports including semiconductors, autos and auto parts. Hong Kong’s merchandise exports jumped 40.8% in May, a separate trade data point that analysts have linked to the broader regional rerouting of Chinese goods.
Trade data collected by China’s General Administration of Customs showed exports grew 6.2% year-over-year in the January-to-November period of 2025, with ASEAN overtaking the European Union as China’s top trading partner for the first time, followed by the EU and then the U.S. That marks a reversal from 2018, when the EU held the top spot, followed by the U.S. and ASEAN.
The ‘China Shock 2.0’ Risk
Goldman’s researchers caution that China’s export-driven growth model carries costs for other economies. A previous analysis by the bank found that for every one percentage point of export-driven boost to China’s GDP, other economies see a drag of 0.1 to 0.3 percentage points, with high-tech producers such as Europe and Japan facing the most acute pressure. Unlike the labor-intensive manufacturing crowded out during China’s earlier export wave, this next phase is expected to displace higher-value, tech-intensive production, a phenomenon the researchers have termed “China Shock 2.0.”
Beyond Goods: A Broader Corporate Push
The shift extends beyond merchandise trade. In a separate October report, Goldman Sachs identified 25 leading Chinese companies across a dozen industries, including Alibaba, BYD and PDD Holdings, that now generate an average of about 34% of their revenue overseas up from a national average of 14% in 2018 to roughly 16% today. Goldman expects that share to keep climbing by about 0.6 percentage point annually as Chinese firms expand into services, technology and intellectual property rather than relying solely on manufactured exports.
The Tariff Backdrop
The report lands against a shifting U.S. tariff picture. Effective tariffs on Chinese imports to the U.S. surged past 100% in April 2025 before falling to 30% in May, and the two countries agreed to further reductions following the Trump-Xi meeting in South Korea in late October. China, in turn, agreed to a one-year postponement of rare-earth export controls and pledged to resume purchases of U.S. soybeans. China’s domestic data reveals a more mixed picture, with retail sales falling in May for the first time since December 2022 even as export-driven industrial output continued to rise.
Not all assessments of China’s trade position are uniformly upbeat. Zhou Mi, a senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, has argued that Beijing’s expansion of imports from developing economies is intended to serve as “a strategic buffer against global economic frictions,” a framing that positions China’s trade strategy as defensive as much as expansionary.
Goldman’s economists expect China’s current account surplus to rise to 4.2% of GDP in 2026, up from 3.6% in 2025, a divergence from the consensus estimate among economists surveyed by Bloomberg, who forecast a decline to 2.5%.
The bank’s researchers say the trend highlights a wider reality: even if U.S.-China tariff talks stabilize further, China’s export machine is now oriented toward a far more diversified set of buyers than it was during the first round of trade tensions in 2018.
