During her debate with Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton implored, “please, fact checkers, get to work.” Heeding her own call, her boast that while she was seretary of state exports to China increased 50 percent definitely needs to be put in context.
First, from a mathematic perspective, she was being a bit modest. Exports grew slightly more than 52 percent. In 2008, U.S. exports to China when Secretary Clinton assumed office were $71.5 billion. In 2012, at the end of her term, total U.S. exports to China were valued at $109 billion. But correlation is not causation.
Clinton’s assertion that “I know how to really work and get new jobs and to get exports that helped create more new jobs” is wildly overstated. The growth in U.S. exports to China were less a result of masterful statecraft, and more a result of China’s own economic situation and domestic agricultural policies.
Soybeans are by far the largest U.S. export item to China—which is the largest soybean importing country in the world. China’s appetite for soybeans is driven by two factors: its rapidly growing consumption of meat, primarily pork–soybean meal is used as a feedstuff for China’s swine herd, which also ranks the largest in the world; and, then, from 2008 to 2012 while Clinton was Secretary of State, China raised subsidies for the production of corn, wheat and rice but not soybeans. This change in subsidy rates provided an incentive for Chinese farmers to switch out of soybean farming in favor of growing the more highly subsidized crops for which China established a goal of 95 percent self-sufficiency. During that period, Chinese soybean production dropped 18 percent, and its imports increased 50 percent.
In 2008, soybean exports when Secretary Clinton assumed office were valued at about $7.3 billion. By 2012, her last year in office, U.S. soybean exports to China had more than doubled to almost $15 billion. Other ag commodities exported to China in 2012 had also grown, including cotton at about $3.4 billion, corn and by-products at about $1.3 billion, and hides and skins at about $827 million. Together these commodities comprised approximately 20 percent of all U.S. exports to China. This was the result of China’s internal demand, not trade negotiations or diplomacy.
The second largest category of U.S. exports to China in 2012 when Secretary Clinton left office? Scrap metal. Exports of U.S. scrap metal to China grew from $6.3 billion in 2008 to $9.5 billion in 2012, a 51 percent increase. China’s appetite for scrap metal, however, has fallen off every year since 2012 and this year, to date, is the lowest since 2003. If the success during Clinton’s tenure in office was the result of her work, and not the result of market ups and downs, she must have not left the file for her successor.
In short, Hillary Clinton’s claims about improving the U.S. China trade relationship amounts to a hill of beans.
