At the origin of the global pandemic, China is however the country which is doing the best economically thanks to a record exports of 2.6 billion dollars last year.

Nicolas Barré takes stock of a current economic issue.

One year almost to the day after the announcement of the first death linked to Covid in China, the world's second-largest economy is breaking records.

It is all the same a sacred paradox: China is the big economic winner of the pandemic of which it is at the origin.

And which we can say that it contributed to the dissemination, since it concealed its existence at the beginning and delayed sounding the alarm.

As the world gradually plunged into the deepest recession in nearly a century, China, thanks to its rapid containment of the pandemic, broke its export record: 2.6 trillion dollars last year, from never seen !

In fact, as production halted all over the confined economies, Chinese factories were taking over.

Never has the demand for products "made in China" been so strong.

The US tariffs have not changed the situation.

Absolutely not, barely a small scratch in the Chinese export machine.

Demand was particularly strong for all products linked directly or indirectly to the pandemic: laptops whose purchases have jumped with teleworking, medical equipment.

The confinement in Western countries has also favored the "made in China" for another reason: the expenditure that households no longer made on outings, restaurants, leisure, in short in services, they have partly deferred to purchases of goods, often made in China.

Hence record trade surpluses.

$ 535 billion last year.

But above all, the lesson to be learned is that this crisis has enabled China to widen the gap, to increase its market shares in industries where it was already powerful but above all to accelerate in sectors like the automobile, in particular electric, while the rest of the world was at a standstill.

As a result, when it comes time to take stock, after a year of economic crisis due to the pandemic, the world's second-largest economy is even more powerful than before, it is an even more formidable competitor.

And each month that passes before our exit from the pandemic reinforces this power, with the consequences we know in terms of job destruction in the middle classes of developed countries.

Roll on the vaccine!