Missouri opened its first trade office in China in 2004 under the leadership of then-Governor Bob Holden, now the Chairman and President of U.S. Heartland China Association. Despite the ebb and flow of interest at the state level, China remains one of Missouri’s top export markets. After a brief dip at the height of the trade war, Missouri’s goods exports to China have recovered, growing 10% in 2021 for a total of $1.8 billion in revenue. Future export growth is likely from categories such as sawmill and wood products, and animal health. Prior to the pandemic, Missouri enjoyed tourism revenue from China above the Heartland’s average. Educational institutions in Missouri have many established partnerships with Chinese universities. In 2022, Washington University celebrated the 20th anniversary of its joint EMBA program with Fudan University. People-to-people friendship remains strong between Missouri and China, as demonstrated by the extremely positive 3-day visit of then-Chinese Ambassador Qin Gang to St. Louis in September 2022. He attended a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the St. Louis-Nanjing sister city relationship, the first such pair between the U.S. and China, threw out the first pitch at the Busch Stadium, and attended the U.S.-China Climate Smart Agriculture Roundtable jointly organized by the Chinese Embassy and USDA.

After a brief dip during the trade war, Missouri in recent years has recovered its exporting of goods to China, growing 10% for a total of $1.8 billion in revenue in 2021–a return to the 2008-2017 average of $1.7 billion. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, service exports from Missouri to China fell by -349%.

Missouri has for the past decade annually generated above $1.5 billion from exporting commodities to China, excluding the trade war period of 2018-2019 which saw the state’s total exporting revenue decrease to around just $1 billion. The cause of this decline is clear enough, as Missouri is one of several Heartland states whose main crop–soybeans–rely on the Chinese market, and Missouri’s exports to China are dominated by soybeans with 61% of the state’s exports being oilseeds and grains. During the trade war, Missouri’s exporting to China slumped by a factor of 41% from 2017 to 2018; Chinese tariffs on American soybeans saw Missouri’s exporting of the commodity drop to just $212 million in 2018 as compared to $1.1 billion in 2021.

Sawmill and wood products became one of Missouri’s top exports to China for the first time in 2020, and grew by 19% in 2021, a boom for Missouri as China is the biggest importer of U.S. hardwood since the country cannot harvest enough domestically to meet demand. The Show-Me State previously benefited from travel and tourism from China above the Heartland’s average, but has declined in recent years from a high in 2016 with $330 million in revenue to just $171 million in 2019 as Chinese tourism slowed, with a near total loss due to the pandemic in 2020.

In recent years, the sale of American farmland to foreign countries–namely China–has been making headlines, and Missouri is no exception. A bill was introduced in 2021 to adopt stricter laws around foreign land ownership in the state to better track the existing law that no more than 1% of land was to be owned by a foreign firm. There remains however, a bright future for China-Missouri relations, as evinced by the recent visit of Ambassador Qin Gang to St. Louis for a delayed celebration of the 40th anniversary of the St. Louis-Nanjing sister city relationship, as well as attending a Climate Smart Agriculture Roundtable hosted by USSEC to discuss areas of collaboration between the US and China on the topic (read more here).

China ranks as Missouri’s leading place of origin for international students in 2022, with an estimated 5,941 students in attendance. This marks an estimated -0.5% decrease in enrollment of Chinese students from 2021 to 2022, and a -16% decrease from 2020 to 2022. In 2022, Washington University celebrated the 20th anniversary of its joint EMBA program with Fudan University.

This data and content is updated periodically. The most recent update was January 2023.