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.

Evidence is mounting of the steady disintegration of Russia’s vital natural gas export industry since the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

Russian news reports estimate that Russian pipeline gas exports could fall by as much as 50 percent in volume this year compared to last year. And last year was a particularly bad year.

The problems are not limited to gas that is supplied via pipelines. The European Union is threatening to restrict imports of liquefied natural gas from Russia, the only bright spot for Russian industry last year.

Russia has largely cut itself off from Europe, its main natural gas customer, a customer that paid full price on time. By launching hostilities and then cutting and manipulating supplies, Russia threw away decades of work and established itself as energy-hungry Europe’s largest gas supplier, ceding that position to Norway.

On Thursday, Izvestia, a Kremlin-linked publication, reported that pipeline exports could fall by 50 percent by 2023, citing a government forecast. That figure is roughly in line with some Western estimates.

Russia has been surprisingly successful in maintaining its share of oil markets despite Western embargoes, although the need to sell at a discount has deeply eroded earnings.

But finding new customers for gas is much more difficult because most fuel is still transported through fixed pipelines. Russia has less capacity than the United States, Qatar and Australia to export liquefied natural gas, a fuel that can be transported on ships like oil.

Russia’s losses have provided an easy win for the United States petroleum industry, which has greatly increased shipments of liquefied natural gas to terminals across Europe.

According to estimates by Viktor Katona, an analyst at Kpler, a research firm, Russian gas exports to the European Union via pipelines are likely to fall by two-thirds this year. And exports fell by more than 50 percent in 2022, the first year of the invasion.

Russia is likely to see some gains in gas sales to China and possibly Turkey – now Moscow’s largest consumers of gas. Russia is exporting gas to China through a pipeline called the Power of Siberia, and it’s angling to build another connection. But right now, China is only a fraction of the market Europe used to be for Russian gas.

The European strategy to reduce dependence on Russian gas and other energy sources has worked surprisingly well. Europe largely offset the losses by increasing imports of liquefied natural gas, largely from the United States, and reducing demand. The European Union recently reported that gas consumption was from August through March nearly 18 percent below average over those months from 2017 to 2022.

Europe has now survived what was once a difficult winter with little disruption, which has calmed markets. European gas prices, which peaked in the first months of the war, have fallen by almost 90 percent since their peak in August. Those price drops will translate into lower revenues from the gas that Moscow does manage to sell.

Russian oil revenues are also under pressure, falling 29 percent in the first quarter of 2023 from the last three months of 2022 to about $39 billion as sanctions and price caps began to bite, according to a study released Wednesday. has been published by the Kyiv School of Economics.

Now that this success is behind us, European leaders are considering extending their attack to imports of liquefied natural gas from Russia.

Moscow last year significantly increased shipments of liquefied natural gas to Europe, largely from an Arctic facility, while cutting back pipeline exports. Russian LNG shipments to Europe hit record levels in February, according to Rystad Energy, a consulting firm.

But Kadri Simson, the EU’s energy commissioner, has urged members of the bloc and European energy companies to stop buying Russian LNG and “not sign any new contracts with Russia,” she said. told lawmakers last month.

Some analysts are skeptical that the European Union would ban Russian LNG purchases, not least because TotalEnergies, one of France’s main companies, and Naturgy, a major Spanish energy company, are big buyers of gas from the facility called Yamal LNG .

“We think it would be a real headache for the EU to do that,” said James Waddell, head of European gas and global LNG at Energy Aspects, a research firm.

On the other hand, European leaders, who have largely gone cold turkey on Russian pipeline gas, can calculate that “going without Russian LNG would be less harmful,” said Massimo Di Odoardo, vice president for gas at Wood Mackenzie, a consulting firm.