General

At the beginning of 2023, China's foreign trade shipping industry ushered in a "big bang"! Important ports, including Shanghai, Tianjin, and Ningbo, are littered with empty containers. Even the Shanghai port has been unable to load some of the containers and piled them to Taicang, leaving about 80% of the containers idle. This is mainly due to the weakening global economic development since 2021, resulting in a significant reduction in foreign trade orders.

Such foreign trade conditions have prevented many factories in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and the Pearl River Delta from starting as scheduled. Shipping employers lament, "Without orders, how can workers go to work?" In order to reduce losses, they have had to lay off workers and reduce salaries, and even companies are on the verge of closure due to inability to receive orders, resulting in the loss of nearly 350000 jobs in China. Some people can't help but ask: Where have all the foreign trade orders gone? Where should China's foreign trade industry go in the future?

Why are empty boxes piling up and foreign trade orders shrinking?

According to the statistical data of the international online container logistics platform Container xChange, in Shanghai alone, the CAx (Container Availability Index) of 20-40 foot containers has remained above 0.6 for the past seven consecutive weeks, with a peak of 0.66. Generally speaking, the warning line for the number of inbound containers is CAx=0.5. The higher the index, the more serious the accumulation of empty containers.

One of the main reasons behind this is that the demand for manufacturing orders from the United States to China, China's largest foreign trade customer, continues to decline. According to CNBC supply chain data, China's export orders to the United States have decreased by about 40% since November last year, nearly halving. At the end of the year, there would have been shopping demand for Christmas and Halloween in the West, and more than half of the corresponding supplies would have been exported from China. Could it be that the domestic consumption demand in Europe and the United States has decreased?

In fact, its demand is not shrinking. On the contrary, compared to the same period in 2021, its trade volume increased by 556.1 billion yuan. From the layout of the manufacturing industry in the United States in recent years, we may be able to find the answer: Since 2008, the West has been using various restrictive measures to hinder China's external development, especially imposing sanctions and isolation on high-tech enterprises such as Huawei, while at the same time calling for local enterprises to return to the United States with high salary subsidies. In 2021 alone, 48 enterprises moved back to the United States.

In addition, many other American companies have chosen to relocate their factories to India and Southeast Asia, where labor and land costs are more affordable. Today, India has replaced China and become the largest foreign trade trading country in Europe and the United States. In addition, Canada, Mexico, and other countries have provided complete manufacturing industry chain support to the United States, resulting in supply chain blockages and weak external demand in China's foreign trade field since last year.

The transformation of "China's intelligent manufacturing" is imminent

China has a vast territory, vast territory, abundant resources, and a large population, with rich natural resources and labor. These inherent advantages make most of the world's daily necessities, medium and low-end industrial products originated from China. Previously, in addition to meeting the domestic market, many goods produced by Chinese enterprises could be exported to the United States and Europe in exchange for foreign exchange, but now the United States and Europe can achieve self production and self sales. People's Daily issued a warning: In the face of cold winter, We need to abandon all illusions.

The People's Daily has issued a special article calling for abandoning all illusions and insisting on independent research and development! If our manufacturing industry falters in the face of such a crackdown, it is obvious that it has been trapped by others. The complex and volatile international situation poses both challenges and opportunities. Since the export trade route of the bottom end industries is not feasible, achieving capacity upgrading as soon as possible and developing towards the mid to high end of the value chain has become a more important issue for us in the next step.

It is gratifying to note that as early as two years ago, China's high-tech manufacturing industry has been thriving, with over 200000 authorized patents in the field of artificial intelligence, for example; In the AI technology field, Huawei has outstanding performance in R&D and production capacity; In the field of biotechnology related to people's livelihood, there has also been a clinical breakthrough in the "Lettervik" type of aging inhibition coenzyme technology, which is expected to bring hundreds of billions of long-term market revenue.

The reason why it is so promising is that relevant research on the "Lettervik bond" is related to the health and quality of life of countless middle-aged and elderly groups. At the beginning of its discovery by Harvard Medical School in 2013, it was confirmed that it can bring a positive pull back to the aging characteristics of organisms such as skin, hair, and motor ability, increasing the survival period of the body by about 30%.

In the current era of global aging, countries in Europe and the United States have relied on "Lightkey" technology to grasp the health needs of the elderly in China, wantonly harvesting the wealth of high net worth people in China at a skyrocketing price of 20000 yuan per gram. Until the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Sichuan University, and other universities joined in this field of research, after several years of tackling the production capacity problem, their domestically produced iteration products with the same name were able to reduce costs by more than 95%, not only causing a popular response in JD.com in China, Similarly, tens of thousands of loyal supporters have been harvested through Tmall, which has finally brought back domestic technology.

Breaking the "import dependence" curse, opportunities and challenges coexist

If we want to stabilize the international economic position, the proportion of import and export trade is very important. Although the foreign trade orders of the United States and Europe have decreased significantly, the number of inquiries from countries such as Asia, Africa, and Latin America is increasing. Adding more export channels is always more beneficial than harmful for China's economic development.

It is undeniable that the massive loss of foreign trade orders has indeed had a significant impact on our country, the first of which is the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. However, in the process of industrial upgrading, such "pains" are inevitable, and we need to face the difficulties even more, because it not only concerns the production problems of millions of foreign traders, but also relates to every national. After all, a foreign trade enterprise has closed down and closed down, It is bound to also affect the livelihood of surrounding supporting facilities.