China’s Current Account Surplus Reaches $276.1 Billion in Third Quarter
Key Facts
China’s current account surplus reached $276.1 billion in the third quarter of 2026, according to data published by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange on November 13. The figure puts the external trade reading against the backdrop of a growing U.S. debate over China’s access to advanced chip and artificial intelligence technologies. In a report published on November 14, the Associated Press said lawmakers from both U.S. parties were pushing for tougher legislation to prevent China from accessing advanced U.S. technologies. The debate centers on export controls and mechanisms for reviewing chip sales licenses, while intersecting with national security and AI concerns.
The current account details show a divergence among its components: goods trade recorded a surplus of $350.1 billion in the third quarter, while services trade posted a deficit of $63.9 billion. The State Administration of Foreign Exchange announced the figures on November 13, specifying that they covered the third quarter of the year, rather than a daily reading. The goods surplus shows that merchandise trade was the largest component of the recorded surplus, while the services deficit reduced the overall balance. These figures provide context for China’s trade activity as U.S. discussions about technology intensify. They are separate, however, from the debate over espionage allegations, which concerns access to chips, models and intellectual property.
In credit, October data published by the People’s Bank of China on November 13 showed net new yuan loans fell by 100 billion yuan. That followed an increase of 1.08 trillion yuan in September and contrasted with a Wall Street Journal poll forecast for a 10 billion yuan increase in October. Net lending thus shifted from strong growth in the previous month to a contraction in the period covered by the data. The figures refer to October, although they were published in November, and do not represent loan activity on November 13 alone. The credit reading adds domestic context to the current account report without making the two indicators a direct measure of the impact of chip restrictions or political tensions.
On the U.S. side, the Associated Press said lawmakers from both parties were calling for tougher legislation to prevent China from obtaining advanced chip and AI technologies. The Senate version of the defense policy bill includes congressional review and tracking of licenses to sell advanced AI chips to China. This reflects a shift from general political calls to proposals addressing how licenses would be monitored. China’s Foreign Ministry, according to the agency, said the United States should stop what it called “Chinese spy” narratives used as a pretext to impose technology restrictions. China’s response puts the dispute over security narratives at the center of the disagreement over the limits of access to U.S. technology.
The dispute also involves export chips: the Associated Press reported that U.S. restrictions had prevented China from obtaining the latest AI chips, while President Donald Trump earlier in the year approved exports of H200 chips, which the agency described as advanced but not the company’s most powerful. The Nvidia scandal and the possibility of new U.S. restrictions could complicate AI talks between Washington and Beijing. The agency quoted analysts questioning whether export controls could be separated from discussions about AI safety. In this context, it said the two sides had committed to the idea of establishing a hotline for incidents related to national security and AI. That commitment remains an agreement in principle on a communications channel, while debate over legislation and licenses continues.
In a separate effort to protect models, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency urged companies to monitor unusual patterns and adjust their responses to suspected distillation attempts. It also recommended that model providers, cloud platforms and API aggregators share threat intelligence to connect activity that might appear to be spread across different actors. Anthropic said activity it attributed to an Alibaba campaign involved more than 151 million observed exchanges between May and July 2026, and that the company used the extracted data to develop its models and internal research and development efforts. In another case, the U.S. Justice Department said Ding stole more than 2,000 pages of Google’s AI-related trade secrets between May 2022 and April 2023, then uploaded them to his personal Google Cloud account.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics is scheduled to release its national economic performance statement on November 16, alongside separate monthly data on industrial production and retail sales. The releases will provide a more recent reading of industrial activity and consumer spending following publication of the current account and credit figures. The data come in a week when indicators of China’s economy intersect with the U.S. debate over chip licenses and technology restrictions. The question of whether export controls can be separated from AI safety talks will also remain on the agenda in relations between the two countries, according to analysts quoted by the Associated Press.