China’s 2025 city-level foreign trade figures show a market in motion rather than a monolith. Shenzhen and Shanghai remain locked in a razor-close duel at the top — together they account for roughly a fifth of the nation’s external commerce — even as a wider set of inland and smaller coastal cities make decisive gains.
Shenzhen kept its lead as China’s largest trading city with 4.55 trillion RMB of imports and exports, growing 1.4% year-on-year. Shanghai closed in at 4.51 trillion RMB with a faster 5.6% pace, narrowing the gap to about 430 billion RMB and underscoring a new phase in a high-stakes rivalry between China’s manufacturing powerhouse and its global trading hub.
Beneath the summit, competition for places in the top ranks intensified. Dongguan reclaimed the title of China’s fifth-largest trading city with 1.57 trillion RMB and a 13.8% gain, overtaking Ningbo, which recorded 1.45 trillion RMB and much slower growth. The contrast reflects differing trade models: Dongguan’s processing- and export-led factories are benefitting from a modest global demand rebound, while Ningbo’s general-trade orientation functions as a steadier gateway for China’s internal–external circulation.
The single most dramatic story is Jinhua, propelled by the market centre of Yiwu, which pushed the city past the 1 trillion RMB mark for the first time (10,508.6 hundred million RMB, or ~1.05 trillion RMB). Yiwu’s small-commodity ecosystem — tens of thousands of stalls trading millions of SKUs to more than 230 countries — and a boom in cross-border e-commerce (import lists exceeded 100 million orders) explain how a mid-sized inland city vaulted into the nation’s top ten.
A parallel transformation is taking place inland. Provincial capitals such as Xi’an, Hefei and Jinan posted export-led growth of roughly 20% or more, driven by integrated circuits, photovoltaics, electric vehicles and batteries. Xi’an’s 2025 total stood at 498.7 hundred million RMB (just shy of 500 billion RMB), with exports up sharply; the rise of these “technology-cluster” cities reflects China’s push to move up the value chain and to reroute trade away from a narrow coastal core.
Logistics innovations have underpinned much of this dispersion. The China–Europe freight train network passed 20,000 departures in 2025, moving goods worth over $67.7 billion, and the Xi’an route alone ran more than 6,000 trains. Those land corridors have turned interior manufacturing regions into effective exporters, shortening the ‘outbound’ bottleneck that historically favoured port cities.
Not all stories are of ascent. Fuzhou’s foreign trade collapsed by 24% as lower-tech sectors such as garments and furniture lost ground to lower-cost Southeast Asian producers. Several traditional northern port cities also posted declines, reflecting a combination of industrial stagnation and shifting global demand. Meanwhile, smaller specialised hubs — Wuhu (automotive exports), Tongling (resource-heavy imports for copper processing) and Fangchenggang (a southern transshipment and resource hub linked to ASEAN) — recorded some of the fastest growth rates, highlighting heterogeneous local strategies.
Taken together the figures mark a structural moment: China’s coastal concentration of external commerce is loosening as new nodes — inland, border and specialised coastal ports — deepen their roles in global supply chains. For foreign firms, suppliers and policymakers, the message is clear: China’s trading geography is becoming more networked and sectorally differentiated, with implications for logistics, resilience and the balance of regional economic power.