China Beats US Dominance in Global Commerce with Higher Trade in Goods

China has surpassed the dominance of the United States as the biggest trading nation in the world in terms of total imports and exports of goods, showed official figures of 2012 from both the countries.

Chinese exports and imports together totalled $3.87tn (£2.45tn, €2.9tn) in 2012 as against the sum of $3.82tn reported by the US Commerce Department.

According to data released by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, the countriy's econnomy which is double the size of China suffered a goods deficit of over $700bn while China reported a goods trade surplus of $231.1bn, the largest in four years.

But with the figures of services trade included, the US remains in the top position with total trade at $4.93tn.

However, the increase is seen commensurate with China's emergence as one of the most important trading partners for several countries surpassing the supremacy of the world's biggest economy in global commerce.

"It is remarkable that an economy only a fraction of the size of the US economy has a larger trading volume," Nicholas Lardy, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics told the Bloomberg.

The US economy contracted 0.1 percent in the final three months of last year, first time in three and half years.

China's GDP totaled 51.93tn yuan ($8.3tn) in 2012, showed data from the National Bureau of Statistics.

Apart from the China's fast growing trade links with the Asian and African counties, the Communist nation is on the verge of becoming one of the biggest bilateral trading partners for a number of countries in the Europe such as Germany.

"For so many countries around the world, China is becoming rapidly the most important bilateral trade partner," Jim O'Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs's asset management division told the Bloomberg.

"At this kind of pace by the end of the decade many European countries will be doing more individual trade with China than with bilateral partners in Europe".