China trumped the US in 2004 as the world`s leading exporter of high-tech goods like laptop computers, mobile phones and digital cameras, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said yesterday.
Official data from the Paris-based OECD highlighted how fast the country, still Communist Party-controlled, has emerged as an economic power that the US and other long-industrialised countries can no longer ignore.
China exported $180 billion worth of ICT goods in 2004, compared with US exports of $149 billion, the OECD, a free-market organisation whose 30-country membership does not include China, said.
China was likely to have kept the newly conquered top spot in 2005 too, but hard proof would take many months to collect, OECD officials said.
The US was world leader in 2003 with $137 billion of exports of ICT goods, which include video equipment and electronic components, followed by China with $123 billion, the OECD said.
Growing clout
China, which began shifting 20 years ago from communism to what it calls a socialist market model, is now the world`s seventh largest economy, according to World Bank rankings.
It was recently admitted to the World Trade Organisation but is constantly at odds with Washington and Europe over cut-price exports of cheap clothes and over state currency controls, which its trading rivals say, distort fair price competition.
The OECD said China used to depend on Europe and the US for microchips and other components for high-tech goods, but that it was now increasingly self-sufficient and turning more to neighbours.
"The data show a shift towards more trade between China and other Asian countries, with a corresponding decline in ICT imports to this region from the European Union and the US," it said.
China was now turning to suppliers in Japan, Taipei, South Korea and Malaysia.
China`s Lenovo Group burst onto the world stage this year as the third-biggest maker of computers with the purchase of US International Business Machines` PC business, behind Dell and Hewlett-Packard.
What started out as a country that made most of the world`s clothes and toys is no longer happy to take a back seat. It is even developing a mobile phone technology that could end up rivalling the GSM and CDMA standards developed in Europe and the US respectively.
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