SURGING exports from China boosted the country’s trade surplus to its highest level for at least nine years in December, threatening to increase pressure on Beijing to revalue the yuan.

In the latest confirmation of its export boom, Chinese exports jumped by 32.7 per cent last month compared with a year before.

The rise followed a 45.9 per cent year-on-year increase in November, and pushed China’s global trade surplus for last month to $11.08 billion (£5.9 billion), the highest level since at least 1995.

For the whole of last year, China’s trade surplus reached $31.98 billion — three times higher than forecasts and above the $25 billion recorded in the previous year.

Economists said the data would increase US demands for Beijing to move more aggressively towards weakening the yuan’s peg to the dollar. This would allow the dollar to rise and limit China’s competitiveness in world trade.

“This news will doubtless add to US pressure for a revaluation of the [yuan], though these calls will have little influence in Beijing,” said Julian Jessop, chief international economist at Capital Economics, the consultancy, in London.

Mr Jessop said that despite the political criticism from the US of rising Chinese exports to the world’s richest economies, China’s trade surplus still amounted to a small share of its national income, at just 2 per cent of GDP.

“This is comparatively modest and does not suggest that the [yuan] is massively overvalued,” he said.

The small size of the trade surplus as a share of national income has resulted from the rapid build-up of Chinese imports. This has mirrored the rise in the country’s exports, as the world’s seventh-largest economy has rapidly expanded. A senior Chinese official estimated yesterday that the country’s economy grew by 9 per cent last year.

The scale of China’s global trading activity is emphasised by figures showing its exports amount to 37 per cent of its GDP, compared with equivalent figures of 25 per cent for the UK, 12 per cent for Japan, and 9 per cent for the US.

But China’s imports also account for 35 per cent of GDP against figures of 28 per cent for the UK, 13 per cent for the US and 10 per cent for Japan.

Pressure on China to revalue the yuan is expected to intensify. But officials in Beijing have said that any move to weaken the currency’s peg to the dollar would proceed gradually over the coming months.