Foreign Trade Hits Record Highs Year After Year, So Why Is There No More Labor Shortage?

Ask AI · How will the upgrade of China’s foreign trade structure change the employment landscape?

If you ask what is the most resilient in this world?

The answer must be China’s foreign trade.

In 2018, when Trump initiated a trade war, China’s exports were $2.48 trillion; by 2025, with Trump returning to continue tariff battles, China’s exports surged to $3.77 trillion.

In the first two months of this year, the figures are even impressive: imports and exports grew by 20.97% year-on-year, exports alone increased by 21.8%, reaching a record high of $656.578 billion.

But has anyone thought about one thing?

In previous years, our foreign trade exports, though much smaller than today’s scale, always faced labor shortages every spring, with factories struggling to hire even with wage increases. Now, despite our exports increasing so much, the difficulty in recruiting workers in foreign trade factories has largely disappeared.

Even if there are still some issues, they are no longer the same as before—it’s not about the difficulty of finding general labor or basic positions, but rather that finding highly skilled or multidisciplinary professional talents remains challenging.

A friend working in a major export city along the coast lamented that, in the past, export figures were much lower, but he spent the whole year running around recruiting for local export processing companies. Recently, with export figures skyrocketing year after year, he’s instead worried about promoting employment.

Why is this happening?

The answer lies in the changing structure of export products.

Overall, the shift is from low value-added products to higher value-added ones. From labor-intensive industries like textiles, clothing, and light industry, which relied heavily on labor dividends, to technology and innovation-driven sectors such as electronics, automobiles, machinery, and home appliances—these are now more technology-intensive.

What’s especially surprising to many is that in the first two months, China’s integrated circuit exports surged by 72.6% year-on-year. A country once short of chips is now accelerating toward becoming a major chip exporter.

In other words, increasing export volume does not necessarily lead to more employment opportunities proportionally. On the contrary, technological advancements may even reduce the demand for labor.

The reasoning is simple: an iPhone’s export value might be equivalent to dozens or hundreds of shirts, but its impact on employment or opportunities for ordinary workers may be less than that of dozens of shirts (of course, even shirts now use less labor than before).

If we compare chips, the difference is even greater.

Not only in foreign trade exports, but similar issues are happening in other rapidly evolving sectors driven by technology: industry scale and added value increase, but the direct employment opportunities decrease.

In other words, more and more unskilled laborers are finding it increasingly difficult to share in the economic growth driven by technological progress.

This may also be one of the reasons for the disparity in economic experiences. In the past, thousands of people could produce several hundred million shirts, earning modest incomes but everyone had some earnings. Now, thousands produce smartphones, cars, and chips worth tens or hundreds of billions. The total economy and wealth have multiplied many times, but the number of people feeling good about it has decreased exponentially.

Today, everyone is celebrating AI and technological advancements, believing they will drive even greater economic growth. That’s correct. But the inclusive benefits of technological-driven economic growth do not necessarily grow proportionally with the total technological and economic scale—in fact, they may even be inversely related.

How to make technological-driven economic development more inclusive is a question worth paying attention to and will undoubtedly be a key focus for national research and policy.