One of the things that Donald Trump has told he's going to do is reduce that Chinese trade surplus with the US. Lo and behold The Donald has been in office a little more than a month and China starts running a trade deficit. Year-on-year trade data tends to be highly volatile in the first two months of each calendar year because of this. Setting this aside, imports data still reflected resilient demand in the onshore market. When these sorts of things happen on a regular basis we strip them out of our economic statistics.

Source: Forbes March 08, 2017 12:15 UTC