China ended the Year of Covid in many ways stronger than it started, accelerating its movement toward the center of a global economy long dominated by the U.S. While the U.S. and Europe wait for vaccine rollouts to get fully back on track, China is the only major economy expected to report growth for 2020, helping it close the gap with the U.S.
It has expanded its role in global trade and shored up its position as the world’s factory floor, despite years of U.S. efforts to persuade companies to invest elsewhere. China’s consumer market—lifted by its quick recovery from Covid-19—keeps gaining momentum, making it a bigger driver of global companies’ earnings. And the country has solidified its standing as a force in global financial markets, with a record share of initial public offerings and secondary listings in 2020, large capital inflows into stocks and bonds, and indexes that far outperformed even the U.S.’s strong showing.
The upshot is a world more reliant on China for growth than ever before. For 2020, China’s economy is expected to account for 16.8% of global gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, according to forecasts by Moody’s Analytics. That’s up from 14.2% in 2016, before the U.S. and China entered a trade war. The U.S. is expected to make up 22.2%, virtually unchanged from 22.3% in 2016. China’s 2020 increase in its share of global GDP—1.1 percentage points—is its largest in a single year since at least the 1970s.
The gains are a testament to China’s success in containing Covid-19 and getting its businesses humming again. The country’s stimulus programs, which were smaller as a portion of the overall economy than in the U.S., focused on restoring factory production and keeping small businesses from going bust, with relatively little direct support for consumers.
That strategy paid off when, unusually in a recession, U.S. consumers kept spending heavily. Chinese factories were ready to serve them. That helped support Chinese jobs and China’s own consumer spending through the rest of the year.