China’s trade economy is slowly coming back to life, but the coronavirus outbreak has already inflicted huge and lasting damage to global trade. A series of metrics showed that this week, China made significant progress in kick-starting its imports and exports, with seaborne freight levels in particular returning to close to what they were before the crisis put large swathes of China’s economy on lockdown. Data from Cargometrics, which tracks every vessel on the planet, showed that seaborne imports to China surpassed their pre-Lunar New Year levels and the average daily tonnage of between 2012 and 2019 on seven ... (full story)