Spring Festival cherries show trade is not zero-sum game

What appears to be a minor change in the fruit aisle actually tells a much larger story. The fall of the price of cherries offers a clear window into how China's approach to globalization works — and how its gains can be increasingly shared across borders.

The driver is supply. Chile, China's largest source of imported cherries, has recorded a bumper harvest, pushing export volumes to record levels. But abundant harvests alone don't explain why the price reduction has traveled so quickly and visibly to consumers. In many countries, lower upstream costs are absorbed by tariffs, logistics inefficiencies or layers of intermediaries.

What makes China stand apart is how sharply trade and logistics costs have fallen. On the trade side, China has steadily reduced tariffs on agricultural imports through expanded free trade arrangements with major producing countries. For example, the upgraded China-Chile Free Trade Agreement that took effect in 2019 placed roughly 98 percent of traded products under zero tariffs. Lower border costs mean that when supply rises, prices are no longer artificially supported. Market signals move faster, and consumers see the results.

Logistics matter just as much. Shipping times for cherries from Chile to China have been cut from roughly five to six weeks to about 23 days following the opening of Peru's deep-water Chancay Port, a Belt and Road infrastructure project linking the Pacific coast more directly to Asian markets.

For cherries, transit time is the cost story. Less time at sea means less waste and lower risk priced into each shipment, allowing products once sustained by luxury margins to be sold at scale.

These efficiencies are already reshaping production decisions. Chilean growers have expanded planting, confident that China's market can absorb large volumes with consistent trade rules. Scale is reducing risk rather than amplifying it. For producers, the benefit is not just higher sales, but predictability — a rare asset in agriculture.

China's demand patterns reinforce this stability. Consumption peaks around the Spring Festival, when gifting traditions intensify and the red-colored fruit carries symbolic appeal. For exporters, this is not cultural curiosity; it is a reliable, seasonal demand window that supports planning, investment and long-term contracts.

The result is a textbook case of shared gains. Chinese consumers gain access to high-quality imports at prices once unthinkable. Producers gain a vast, dependable market capable of absorbing surplus without collapse. Trade expands without undermining returns along the supply chain.

In some Western discussions, such price declines are labeled "dumping". But the charge is often political rather than economic. When efficiency gains are politicized, normal cost reductions are reframed as unfairness and supply-chain progress becomes a target rather than an achievement.

China's globalization, in this sense, is neither abstract nor ideological. It is transactional. It works through infrastructure, logistics and market access rather than slogans. Its effects are visible not in communiques, but in balance sheets and shopping baskets.

At a moment when globalization is increasingly questioned, cherries show what still works. Openness delivers when it reduces friction and allows scale to pass benefits through. China's response to the backlash has not been retreat, but repetition: continuing to open, connect and trade so that gains are shared rather than zero-sum.