The novel Coronavirus has disrupted the global economy, and in particular international trade (Baldwin, 2020a). According to the’World Trade Statistical Report 2020’, published by the World Trade organization, global container throughput has dropped by 8% during the fist quarter of 2020, while new export orders declined by as much as 50% for both goods and services over the same time period (World Trade Organization, 2020a). Parallels have been drawn between the trade effects of the current pandemic and financial crisis of 2008, and some researchers anticipate the pandemic-induced contraction in international trade to overshadow the Great Trade Collapse of 2008-09 (Baldwin, 2009, 2020a). Baldwin and Freeman (2020), for example, argue that, unlike the financial crisis which stifled global demand for traded products, the pandemic triggers a ‘triple effect’on trade through 1) the disruption of domestic supply, 2) the reduction in global demand, and 3) the contagion effect spread through disrupted global value chains (GVC). As the world’s largest exporter and second largest importer of internationally traded goods and services and a central node in the GVC networks of a variety of products, China not only faces the ramifications of this global pandemic through its dependence on trade, but disruptions to Chinese exports may also be the root cause of the ‘infection’of the globalized economy.

In this study, we estimate the overall impact of the Coronavirus pandemic on Chinese exports and explore the heterogeneity of trade effects across Chinese provinces, international trade partners, and commodities. Moreover, we dissect the hypothesized ‘triple pandemic effect’on trade and evaluate the individual contributions of the pandemic-induced domestic supply, international demand, and GVC contagion shocks. Our investigation sheds first light on the sensitivity of international trade flows to the pandemic along all three of these transmission channels and shows that Chinese exports not only fall in response to a rise in domestic and international destination country Covid-19 cases, but also through increasing exposure of Chinese production to the GVC contagion. Our baseline empirical analysis of the elasticity of Chinese exports with respect to domestic and foreign infections provides economically and statistically significant estimates suggesting that for every 1% rise in new domestic and international Coronavirus cases Chinese exports fall by 2.5% to 4.6%. In aggregate, these estimates suggest that the short-run losses in Chinese exports during the first half of 2020 may be as large as 40% to 45% of the predicted counterfactual Chinese exports in the absence of the pandemic.