China and the U.S. have adopted distinctly different strategies to deal with the coronavirus pandemic since its outbreak. While China has made every effort to ensure the stability of the supply chain and focused on the supply side, the U.S. has practiced policies guided by modern monetary theory to strongly stimulate demand, and supply recovery has trailed demand. As a result, the U.S. became highly dependent on Chinese manufacturing after the pandemic, and Chinese exports to the U.S continued to grow rapidly, completely reversing the decline during the Trump trade war period (2018-2019).
Looking ahead to 2022, as it is difficult to reduce the supply and demand gap in the shortterm, not to mention high inflation and other factors, U.S. demand for Chinese goods will remain strong and China’s exports to the U.S will continue to grow rapidly. In the long run, the competition between China and the U.S. will be enduring and complicated, but economic and trade relations will always be the ballast of China-U.S. relations, and China’s core strategy will still lie in following the trend of globalization, continuously deepening reforms internally, and expanding market access and strengthening cooperation externally.
