Beijing —

As US duties on Chinese imports spun higher and higher earlier this year, Derek Wang braced for major disruption.

With US orders ground to a halt, Wang, 36, who sells intelligent cookware out of southern China’s Guangdong province, looked elsewhere to fill the gap. After finding new buyers in Brazil, Japan, Malaysia and Cambodia, he learned what he describes as a key lesson: “Nothing is more important than the markets close to us.”

Stories like Wang’s have played out across China’s vast economy where businesses, large and small, scrambled to fill the void after temporary triple-digit duties – and the threat of their return – upended Chinese exports to the world’s wealthiest market.

The result has been a coup for China’s trade juggernaut.

Instead of seeing exports falter on lost US business, the world’s largest manufacturer has driven them deeper into other markets around the world – building on the country’s global economic footprint and hedges companies made during Trump’s first trade war.

Employees work at a factory in China's Guizhou province last month. Yang Jian/VCG/Getty Images

The resilience gave Beijing confidence in its months-long negotiations with the US, which came to a head in October when leaders Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met and agreed to a truce that whittles new tariffs on Chinese goods down to 20%.

But the push also puts China on track to eclipse last year’s gaping nearly $1 trillion global trade surplus – a balance that’s irritated governments around the world and sparked Trump’s trade war in the first place.

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