The world has grown used to the idea that China and the United States are locked in an economic tug-of-war, with most of the global trade discourse orbiting around tariffs, supply chains, and diplomatic sabre-rattling. But a closer look reveals a stranger, more intricate twist—one that isn’t choreographed solely by Washington and Beijing. On May 2, 2025, macroeconomist Lyn Alden posted a thread that’s posed a few vital questions. The kicker? “Of China’s total exports in a given year, the US buys like 10–15%. Many people don’t seem to appreciate this”.
That quiet figure cuts through a noisy debate. Most commentary assumes that US purchasing power holds China hostage, but Alden’s point flips the premise. The numbers are clear: of the $3.5 trillion China exports annually, only about $400–500 billion heads to the US. The rest—nearly 85%—is spread across a vast network of trade relationships, spanning everything from African minerals to Eastern European tech components.
Alden backed up her claim with charts. One shows China’s export boom since the 1960s—a near-vertical ascent from just above zero to a superpower-level $3.5 trillion by 2025. The story of that rise is familiar, but the scale can still surprise. It’s not just the numbers; it’s where the goods go. By 2020, China had become the largest trading partner of most countries, with an updated map showing large swathes of Africa, Asia, and Latin America coloured red—Beijing red.
One particular point Lyn tries to make is about cars. China is now the world’s largest auto exporter, shipping out nearly 6 million vehicles a year. Very few of them end up in American garages. Instead, they roll into driveways in Brazil, Turkey, Russia, and Southeast Asia. Lyn Alden didn’t mince words: “They became the biggest auto exporter, with virtually all of those cars going to final destinations outside of the US.” And she didn’t stop there—airplanes might be next.
But that’s not the end of the conversation. Brent Johnson from Santiago Capital replied to Alden’s post with a calm but weighty counter: “Yes…but the countries that buy the other 85% get the money to do so by selling their production to the US.” That’s the invisible thread running through the global economy—the shadow of the dollar. If Malaysia is buying Chinese steel, it might be doing so using revenue from semiconductor parts sold to California. The money, if not the merchandise, flows back to the US.
This nuance reshapes how we think about influence. The US dollar remains the world’s reserve currency, giving America a kind of gravity in global trade. Other nations don’t just rely on Chinese goods—they rely on US demand to afford them. So while Alden is right that China’s trade base is geographically diversified, Santiago reminds us that financially, it still hums to an American tune.
Their exchange is polite, data-rich, and quietly subversive. Alden notes, with a hint of weariness, how US protectionist policies try to rewrite the rules. “The US doesn’t even want iPhone prices to double, so we exempt those,” she says, pointing to the irony of trying to decouple while simultaneously dodging the cost of doing so. There’s mutual dependency here, one driven not by ideology but by shelf-stocking and balance sheets.
That mutual dependency is also logistical. A 2025 ING Think report shows how Chinese components continue flowing into American markets through third countries—Vietnam, Malaysia, even Mexico. Integrated circuits are a prime example. More than half of the world’s supply still runs through Chinese or Chinese-linked pipelines, and when tariffs were slapped on Chinese semiconductors, the workarounds kicked in. It turns out re-routing supply chains isn’t so difficult when the goal is to keep the same chips flowing at the same price.
EndGame Macro, another voice in the thread, added a final twist: “Tariffs or decoupling aren’t just trade policy—they’re a direct hit to China’s FX reserves strategy and industrial overcapacity cushion.” If American tariffs slow down Vietnam’s exports, and Vietnam depends on those dollars to buy Chinese steel, then the dominoes wobble. No transaction is isolated. Trade war is never a two-player game.
This is where the “85%” becomes more than a statistic. It’s a mirror of how the global economy actually works. There’s a front-end story of who sells what to whom. But there’s also a backend—the financial plumbing of who pays for it, and in what currency. It explains why decoupling has become the word that sounds simple but plays out like algebra. You can rewire trade routes, but rewiring dollar dependency takes decades.
There’s also the matter of what China is now exporting. It’s no longer the toy factory of the 1990s. Think electric vehicles, solar panels, battery cells, advanced machinery. Alden called it out directly: “Many people still have it in their minds that China makes plastic trinkets.” That image is long gone. The auto export boom alone suggests that China’s next targets might be industries that were once considered untouchable. Aerospace, for instance.
If that’s true, the future may not be a tale of decoupling at all—it may be a tale of economic substitution. China grows its presence in parts of the world where Western influence is either weakening or less welcome. Meanwhile, American consumers keep demanding low-cost goods, and American firms keep finding ways to tap Chinese supply chains without looking like they do.
So what are we left with? A tangled, globalised contradiction. China isn’t wholly dependent on the US, but it is tethered—by dollars, by intermediaries, by demand cycles. The US, meanwhile, talks about building domestic resilience but remains addicted to affordability. Both countries talk strategy; both are held hostage by pricing, logistics, and expectations. The result is less of a chess match and more of a long-distance marriage.
There’s no tidy way to explain how global trade works. It’s not about who buys the most—it’s about who makes it all possible. And sometimes, the real story is hiding between the charts.
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