What you should know about this indicator
- This indicator shows the rank of China among a country's import partners.
- In this data, imports are valued at "cost, insurance, and freight" (CIF). That is the value of the goods plus the cost of shipping and insuring them to the importing country's border. Not every country records its imports this way; for some of those that don't, the IMF adds an estimate of these costs.
- Rank 1 indicates that China was the largest import partner for that country in a given year; rank 2 indicates the second largest, and higher numbers represent lower positions.
- This ranking highlights whether China was a dominant supplier of merchandise imports or played a smaller role in a country's imports.
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Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
For each country and year, all import partners were ordered from largest to smallest by their CIF import values in current US dollars. The position of China in this ranking was then recorded: 1 if it was the top supplier, 2 if the second largest, and so on. Rankings were produced separately for each year.
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Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Rank of China among import partners”, part of the following publication: Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Bertha Rohenkohl, Veronika Samborska, Simon Van Teutem, Diana Beltekian, and Max Roser (2018) - “Trade and Globalization”. Data adapted from International Monetary Fund. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261023-101103/grapher/chinas-rank-in-imports-of-goods.html [online resource] (archived on October 23, 2026).How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
International Monetary Fund (2026) – with major processing by Our World in DataFull citation
International Monetary Fund (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Rank of China among import partners – IMF” [dataset]. International Monetary Fund, “International Trade in Goods (by partner country) (IMTS)” [original data]. Retrieved October 25, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261023-101103/grapher/chinas-rank-in-imports-of-goods.html (archived on October 23, 2026).Download
Quick download
Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.
Data API
Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.
Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/chinas-rank-in-imports-of-goods.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseMetadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/chinas-rank-in-imports-of-goods.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseExcel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/chinas-rank-in-imports-of-goods.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests
# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/chinas-rank-in-imports-of-goods.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})
# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/chinas-rank-in-imports-of-goods.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()R
library(jsonlite)
# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/chinas-rank-in-imports-of-goods.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/chinas-rank-in-imports-of-goods.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/chinas-rank-in-imports-of-goods.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear