Whenever South African officials meet their Chinese counterparts to talk trade, the issue of the imbalance in China’s favour is almost certainly raised.
But a discrepancy in the data from the two sides makes it hard to assess the trade gap.
The latest Chinese customs data suggests that South Africa actually holds a surplus – exporting more to the world’s second-largest economy than it receives in return.
According to the numbers from Beijing, China recorded US$30.58 billion in imports from South Africa last year.
However, the South African data for the same period – via the United Nations International Trade Statistics Database, or UN Comtrade – shows the country shipped goods worth US$13.5 billion to China.
Observers said this multibillion-dollar statistical gap was a reflection of how the true flow of goods between nations could be masked by different reporting practices and “opaque” global commodity chains.
South Africa mainly exports raw materials to China. Gold is the top product by value, and it also sends major shipments of iron ore, platinum, chromium, manganese and diamonds.
China’s exports to South Africa, meanwhile, are mainly value-added manufactured goods such as phones, computers and cars, as well as solar panels, electrical transformers and industrial machinery.
The two nations signed a framework economic partnership agreement on February 6 and South Africa is now fast-tracking an early harvest deal to secure duty-free access to China by late March.
Pretoria is trying to secure reciprocal Chinese investment in South Africa’s automotive sector and is seeking to ship more agricultural and manufactured products to China.
The trade imbalance has long been an issue. At a forum in Beijing in 2024, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa appealed to his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, to help narrow the trade deficit, saying that “we would like to address the structure of our trade”.
According to Marvellous Ngundu, a research consultant at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, the gap in trade figures is to do with statistical and logistical factors rather than misreporting.
Ngundu said that South Africa’s reporting of exports included the value of the goods but not the shipping costs – while China included substantial transport costs when reporting imports.
In addition, he said China also recorded imports by country of origin, whereas South Africa recorded exports by country of consignment.
“If iron ore or platinum is sold through a trading hub like Singapore or Hong Kong but ultimately lands in China, the statistics will diverge sharply,” Ngundu said.
He expected the exports most affected by the statistical gap would be minerals such as iron ore, manganese, coal and platinum group metals – which often involve global commodity trading houses and offshore invoicing.
“This does not automatically suggest systemic under-reporting,” Ngundu said. “Rather, it highlights how opaque and intermediated global commodity value chains have become.”
Refined gold – from South Africa’s Rand Refinery, one of the world’s biggest refiners of gold – is also a product that could be recorded differently by each side, according to Kai Xue, a Beijing-based corporate lawyer who advises on foreign direct investment and cross-border financing.
Xue gave the example of a gold bar that is refined in South Africa from semi-pure alloy imported from Zimbabwe, then shipped to Switzerland or the United Arab Emirates for trading, before eventually being imported to China.
He said South Africa would record that as an export to Switzerland or the UAE, or it could be excluded from merchandise trade if treated as monetary gold. But he said Chinese customs would still record the same bar as an import from South Africa because it was manufactured at a South African refinery.
“As a result, China’s statistics can show large imports of South African gold that do not appear in South Africa’s own export data to China, creating a significant mirror discrepancy,” Xue said.
That discrepancy was highlighted in research conducted by Swiss Aid last year. It found that while South Africa declared that it exported 102 tonnes of gold in 2023, Chinese customs recorded 217 tonnes of imported gold from the country. The situation arises because China classifies any gold bar refined at the Rand Refinery as South African, regardless of its mining origin or transit route.
