China US Photo:VCG

Trade between the world's top two economies slid further in July, latest Chinese customs data showed. The US' purchase of a smaller quantity of made-in-China goods is primarily due to the cyclical decline in demand for electronic products, industry observers said, adding the US' unrelenting trade and tech war has also inhibited bilateral commerce.

The sliding trend of China-US goods trade, seen in the past several months, is expected to continue shortly, the experts predicted.

Bilateral trade reached 2.64 trillion yuan ($366 billion) in the January-July period, down 9.6 percent year-on-year. The volume accounts for 11.2 percent of China's total foreign trade, making the US the third-largest trading partner of China, following the ASEAN and the EU, data from China's General Administration of Customs showed on Tuesday.

Chinese goods export to the US plunged 13 percent year-on-year in the first seven months of the year.

In July, the decline of bilateral trade remained flat with June. But on a monthly basis, the reading edged down slightly by 1.6 percent to 388.47 billion yuan, according to the calculations by the Global Times, based on the official customs data.

Bilateral trade has contracted for several consecutive months, mainly due to the US domestic situation, Wang Qing, chief macroeconomic analyst at Golden Credit Rating International, told the Global Times.

"The US Fed's monetary tightening has obviously restrained consumers' demand," Wang said.

Recent data have shown that other major economies' shipment to the US have also dropped to varying degrees. In addition, in the post-pandemic period, domestic demand in the US has shifted from goods to services, producing adverse impact on China's goods exports to the country, according to Wang.

China's shrinking shipments to the US is also related with the latter's increasing sourcing from developed regions including Western Europe and North America, indicating that the US' demand for high-value durable goods remains relatively resilient post-pandemic, said Wang.

Western media reports have recently said that China is losing the title of the US' top goods exporter to Mexico and Canada, citing data released by the US Department of Commerce.

From January to May this year, the value of goods imported by the US from China reached $168.6 billion, or a year-on-year decrease of 24 percent, accounting for 13 percent of its total imports. At the same time, US imports from Mexico rose 5 percent year-on-year to $195 billion in the same period, ramping up the proportion to 15 percent.

The US is scheduled to release its June and first-half-year foreign trade data on Tuesday.

According to Chinese customs data, in the first half of 2023, trade volume between China and the US was $327.26 billion, tumbling 14.5 percent on a yearly basis. Among them, China's exports to the US fell 17.9 percent, while China's imports from the US decreased by 3.7 percent.

Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Beijing-based Information Consumption Alliance, told the Global Times that, apart from the Fed's policy tightening that curbs consumer demand, developed economies like the US and EU are currently on a downward spiral for buying machinery and electronic goods after the pandemic, when a shopping spree occurred as people were forced to stay at home and consume more.

Since the second half of 2022, the demand for consumer electronics in the US has declined, leaving American businesses with a larger backlog of inventory.