Chinese exports are increasing. Get ready for the global backlash.

China’s factory exports are growing faster than almost anyone expected, putting jobs around the world at risk and sparking a backlash that is gathering momentum.

From steel and cars to consumer electronics and solar panels, Chinese factories are increasingly finding foreign buyers for goods. The world’s appetite for its goods is being welcomed by China, which is experiencing a severe downturn in what has been the economy’s biggest engine of growth: apartment building and furnishing. But other countries are increasingly concerned that China’s rise is partly at their expense and are starting to take action.

The European Union announced last week that it was preparing to impose tariffs (import taxes) on all electric cars arriving from China. The European Union said it had found “substantial evidence” that Chinese government agencies have illegally subsidized these exports, something China denies.

The level of the rates will only be determined in the summer, but will apply from March 7 to every electric car imported by the bloc.

During a visit to Beijing in December, European leaders warned that China is compensating for the housing crisis by building far more factories than it needs.

According to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, China already produces a third of the world’s manufactured goods, more than the United States, Germany, Japan and South Korea combined.

The European Union is also considering import restrictions on wind turbines and solar panels from China. India announced last September that it would impose broad tariffs on steel from China. Turkey complains that China exports skewedly while buying little.

The Biden administration, which has kept in place former President Donald J. Trump’s tariffs, has imposed a growing list of restrictions on U.S. high-tech exports.

“I have prevented the most advanced American technologies from being used in China and have not allowed them to be traded there,” President Biden said in his State of the Union address on Thursday.

Chinese exports, measured in dollars, increased by 7 percent in January and February compared to last year. But falling prices for many Chinese products – due to a glut of production in China – mean that the physical size of exports and their global market share are rising much faster.

China has found ways to avoid some tariffs. Chinese components are sent in increasing volumes to countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia and Mexico. These countries process the goods so that they are considered their own products and not made in China. These countries then ship the goods to the United States and the European Union, which charge them low or even no tariffs.

The United States and the European Union are concerned.

Katherine Tai, the United States Trade Representative, warned last week in remarks at a Brookings Institution event that the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement, was due for review in the summer of 2026. She hinted that the United States could push to tighten rules on the origin of components, especially for cars – also a position married last fall by Robert E. Lighthizer, President Trump’s former trade representative and now the chief trade adviser to Mr. Trump’s election campaign.

China “is already a very important element of tension and concern” in North American trade relations, Ms. Tai said.

In addition to looming tariffs on imported clean energy products, Europe will soon introduce a tax on imports from around the world based on the amount of climate-changing carbon dioxide emitted during their production.

The new tax is known as a carbon border adjustment mechanismor CBAM. But it has been nicknamed the ‘C-bomb’ in Europe because it will fall heavily on imports coming directly or indirectly from China. Two-thirds of China’s electricity is generated by burning heavily polluting coal, meaning much of China’s exports to Europe could be hit by the new tax.

Europe and the United States also face threats from China to their long-term economic ties in developing countries, which are increasingly opting for cheaper Chinese goods. In much of Latin America and Africa, countries now buy more from China than nearby industrial democracies, and there is little the United States and Europe can do about it.

“There are no rules that can prevent dumped and subsidized products from undermining your exports to the rest of the world,” said Susan C. Schwab, United States Trade Representative under President George W. Bush.

For their part, Chinese officials expressed concern at the annual session of the country’s legislature, which ended Monday, about what they see as a wave of unfair protectionism. Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao cited a recent International Monetary Fund study showing that the number of trade restrictions around the world had nearly tripled in the past four years, many of which were against China.

Foreign trade officials and economists generally cite three aspects of China’s industrial policy that promote exports. State-owned banks provide loans to factories at low interest rates. Cities transfer public land for the construction of factories at little or no cost. And the state’s electric grid keeps prices low.

According to the Chinese central bank, new lending to industry rose to $670 billion last year from $83 billion in 2019. In contrast, net real estate lending was $800 billion in 2019 but fell by $75 billion last year.

Zheng Shanjie, China’s top economic planner, last week reaffirmed China’s industrial policy, saying that “land and energy will be channeled to good projects.”

China’s export boom is visible in the trade surplus in manufactured goods, the largest the world has seen since World War II.

Those surpluses correspond to shortages in other countries, which can hinder their growth.

The growing surplus is not only related to rising exports. China has reduced or stopped many industrial goods from the West over the past two decades as part of a series of national security and economic development measures.

China’s industrial goods surpluses are now roughly twice as large relative to the global economy as the largest surpluses achieved by Japan in the 1980s or Germany just before the global financial crisis. calculations by Brad Setser and Michael Weilandt, economists at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Shortages with Japan and Germany have long been tolerated because they are U.S. allies.

But China is an increasingly close ally of Russia, North Korea and Iran. Foreign Minister Wang Yi warmly mentioned all three, especially Russia, during a press conference last week.

“Maintaining and developing China-Russia relations is a strategic choice of both sides based on the fundamental interests of the two peoples,” he said. Russia has become one of China’s fastest growing export markets, especially for cars, as exporters from industrial democracies stopped selling to Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.

Western economists, and even some economists in China, have called for China to do more to help consumers instead of increasing factory production. Premier Li Qiang, China’s second-highest official after Xi Jinping, told the legislature in his annual speech last week that he would move in that direction, but his steps were small.

He said China, for example, would increase minimum government pensions for seniors, but only by $3 a month. That would cost less than one-tenth of a percent of the country’s economic output.