US trade deficit with China is less than $300 billion, not $1 trillion, as Trump said

Graphic Truth: The US trade deficit with China, from zero to now.

Hard as it is to imagine amid the harrowing US-China trade war these days, there was a time when the two countries hardly did any business with each other. That time was about 40 years ago, in the mid-1980s. In those days, China had just barely begun the sweeping economic reforms that would turn a country wrecked by Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution into a new “workshop of the world.” By churning out exports of everything from sneakers and sofas …

US trade deficit with China is less than $300 billion, not $1 trillion, as Trump said

The United States’ trade deficit in goods with China was $295 billion in 2024, less than one-third of Trump’s $1 trillion total.