For the fourth quarter as a whole, Chinese exports rose by just less than 10% year-over-year. That's the highest quarterly rate in more than three years, up from 6.3% and 6.0% in Q2 2017 and Q3, respectively. That acceleration is, predictably, being celebrated as a meaningful leap in global economic fortunes. Instead, it highlights China's grand predicament, one that country just cannot seem to escape.

To begin with, 10% growth is not a robust rate. Far from it, that doesn't even match 2014 or the years immediately before (Q1 2013, for example, saw 18% export growth), let alone 2011 and the “miracle” pre-crisis years. For the three months of Q4 2017, total exports from China are still 1.2% less than they were in the same three months of 2014. That's not growth, most especially that time dimension.

Of course, none of this is news. It's been this way for several years now, which is really the point. Approaching two years since the trough in exports, that in many ways marked the overall low point for the “rising dollar” global downturn, these many months quite conspicuously are devoid of momentum.

Worse, there are growing indications that this may be as good as it gets. The number out of China most people are paying attention to today, the one they will be fretting about for some time, is imports. Chinese imports were up by just 4.5% year-over-year in December, the worst month by far since December 2016 (every other month in 2017 was double digits, with an average January thru November of 17.6%).

Now, one month of bad data doesn't necessarily mean Chinese imports are about to run back toward 2015. What it suggests is that like the rest of 2017 we've seen the best that “global growth” can offer this time and China's further contributions to it. The reason for that is what we find for lack of momentum for exports.

For as much as officials and Western Economists keep pushing the “rebalancing” idea, China's economy remains an investment-led system where FAI (the investment) is derived from the industrial sector and therefore exports. China is inside and out, as it has been for a long time, the barometer of global growth because it is all the all-important marginal pivot in the process.