China's General Administration of Customs confirmed on Tuesday that the country's trade surplus has grown so large that it can no longer be kept on the mainland, and that the Ministry of Commerce has begun loading it, container by container, onto a fleet of cargo ships bound for a holding site in the Pacific.
Officials said the surplus, which reached 1,040 billion dollars in the first ten months of the year, would be stacked in the port of Qingdao before sailing. The Qingdao municipal government has suspended all other berths, closed two highways to make room for container yards and requisitioned the city's stadium as a sorting hall. Customs staff now count the surplus in standard twenty-foot containers, and the count is updated every hour on a board at the port entrance.
"The surplus is a quantity of goods that we have produced and sold abroad, and it must be stored somewhere," said a senior customs official in Beijing. "We have chosen to store it at sea, where there is room."
Europe has responded by drafting a parallel scheme to stop the ships at its ports, and the European Commission has asked its member states to prepare barges. Economist Joe Peissel of Trivium China said the Commission's plan would require new customs posts along every coastline. Trade talks between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, due next week in Shenzhen, will now include a seating plan for the ships.