Asia Agent has been operating on the ground in China since 2008.
For more than 15 years, our work has been consistent:
factories, suppliers, payments, costs, contracts, and crises — in real time.
That matters, because after this long, you learn to tell the difference between noise and structural change.
What we’re seeing now is the second.
Over the years, China has gone through:
Each time, the same question came up: “Is this the end?”
Most of the time, China adjusted and exports continued.
That history is exactly why what’s happening now deserves serious attention.
This analysis isn’t based on a headline or a single announcement.
It’s based on pattern recognition.
For years, China has been accused of the same practices:
Those accusations aren’t new.
This isn’t theory. It’s daily operational reality.
The old separation between
“company money” and “private money”
is disappearing.
China doesn’t change through speeches.
It changes through enforcement.
No big announcements.
No explanations.
Just:
And suddenly, the system behaves differently.
That is exactly what is happening now.
For years, part of China’s competitiveness came from the ability to sell below true cost.
Not always illegally — but enabled by:
As these mechanisms tighten, dumping becomes harder to sustain.
When dumping disappears, real prices surface.
That is what buyers are now feeling.
If China operated like a normal free-floating economy, the massive amount of USD flowing into the country would have pushed the RMB much stronger over time — making Chinese goods more expensive.
China doesn’t allow that.
Currency is managed.
But here’s the critical point:
For exporters today, the RMB–USD move is bad. Period.
Currency movement does not fix this.
It:
Currency adjustment today isn’t an advantage.
It’s damage control.
Not proof.
A signal.
A transition is being managed.
China was always easy to enter operationally — but hard to enter cleanly.
That is changing.
We are seeing:
At the same time, China is experimenting with controlled openness, not everywhere — selectively.
Look at Sanya / Hainan.
The direction is clear:
China isn’t closing.
It’s restructuring access.
From the outside:
“China still looks competitive.”
From the inside:
“Why is everything suddenly harder?”
Because the system is being cleaned up.
And clean systems punish loose supply chains.
Margins built on assumptions don’t erode slowly.
They break suddenly.
If your business depends on:
You are exposed.
The buyers who navigate this successfully are not panicking.
They are:
Distance used to be manageable.
Now it’s a risk.
This is exactly where Asia Agent operates.
On the ground.
Inside the system.
Where enforcement actually happens.
We help buyers:
We don’t guess.
We don’t rely on headlines.
We deal with reality.