With U.S. orders coming to a halt, Wang, 36, who sells intelligent cookware from Guangdong province in southern China, looked elsewhere to fill the gap. After finding new buyers in Brazil, Japan, Malaysia, and Cambodia, he learned what he describes as a key lesson: “Nothing is more important than the markets close to us.”

Stories like Wang’s have played out across China’s vast economy, where businesses large and small scrambled to fill the void after temporary triple-digit duties — and the threat of their return — upended Chinese exports to the world’s wealthiest market. The result has been a boon for China’s trading power. Instead of seeing exports falter due to lost U.S. business, the world’s largest manufacturer has pushed them further into other markets around the world — expanding the country’s global economic footprint and building on the hedges companies created during Trump’s first trade war.

This resilience gave Beijing confidence in its months-long negotiations with the U.S., which came to a head in October when leaders Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met and agreed to a truce that lowered new tariffs on Chinese goods to 20 percent. But the push also puts China on track to surpass last year’s nearly USD 1 trillion global trade surplus — an imbalance that has irritated governments around the world and helped spark Trump’s trade war in the first place. (CNN)