section_path: Economy/China in the global economy
section_name: China in the global economy
paragraph_text: China in the global economy
  
  China has been a member of the WTO since 2001 and is the world's largest trading power. By 2016, China was the largest trading partner of 124 countries. China became the world's largest trading nation in 2013 by the sum of imports and exports, as well as the world's largest commodity importer, accounting for roughly 45% of maritime's dry-bulk market.
  
  China's foreign exchange reserves reached US$3.246 trillion as of March 2024, making its reserves by far the world's largest. In 2022, China was amongst the world's largest recipient of inward foreign direct investment (FDI), attracting $180 billion, though most of these were speculated to be from Hong Kong. In 2021, China's foreign exchange remittances were $US53 billion making it the second-largest recipient of remittances in the world. China also invests abroad, with a total outward FDI of $147.9 billion in 2023, and a number of major takeovers of foreign firms by Chinese companies.
  
  Economists have argued that the renminbi is undervalued, due to currency intervention from the Chinese government, giving China an unfair trade advantage. China has also been widely criticized for manufacturing large quantities of counterfeit goods. The U.S. government has also alleged that China does not respect intellectual property (IP) rights and steals IP through espionage operations. In 2020, Harvard University 's Economic Complexity Index ranked complexity of China's exports 17th in the world, up from 24th in 2010.
  
  The Chinese government has promoted the internationalization of the renminbi in order to wean itself off its dependence on the U.S. dollar as a result of perceived weaknesses of the international monetary system. The renminbi is a component of the IMF's special drawing rights and the world's fourth-most traded currency as of 2023. However, partly due to capital controls that make the renminbi fall short of being a fully convertible currency, it remains far behind the Euro, the U.S. Dollar and the Japanese Yen in international trade volumes.