CFR senior fellow. Views are my own. Retweets are not endorsements. Writes on sovereign debt and capital flows.
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China has a great deal of agency. It chooses to have its state banks intervene to hold its currency down v the USD. It has chosen to maintain a regressive tax system (with heavy taxes on low wage work and consumption) and to limit redistribution and social benefits 
The FT stated the obvious "Beijing has relied on exports in recent years to meet its ambitious annual growth targets" - the IMF should too ...
Always striking to me that there is a lot more talk about the dollar as a reserve currency now, when the impact of reserve holdings on markets is waning, than there was talk of the market impact massive reserve growth back when it was happening
This argument in particular has two particular problems --
and set aside funds borrowed from the IMF and SDR conversion -- even so Argentina's net fx reserves are flat (data through July). And ~ half of that fx more or less is CNY from the PBOC swap line which isn't freely convertible into USD ...
First things first -- don't obsess too much about the slowdown in exports relative to July. That is mostly a base effect. Exports in dollar terms have been pretty constant the last few months, at levels (in USD terms) a bit higher than last year 
President Xi apparently views the phase one deal as one sided (China accepted significant US tariffs and committed to large purchases to avoid even larger tariffs ... ) and doesn't want a repeat
And useful detail on a number of meds, including those where there is a well known (but not yet resolved) dependence on a few factories in China
I don't see any signs of deindustrialization in China's trade (China is still gaining market share in a range of industries, including autos)
Imports from China continue to be on an strong upward trend (Chinese industrial policies, China's undervalued CNY .. ). They are now running around EUR 40b a month/ EUR 500b a year. The EV case didn't have a macro impact
Looks like there were net sales of LT Treasuries tho, led by official investors ... so a bifurcated report
This potentially matters quite a lot, as the primary impact of the tariffs on China to date have been a reallocation of the point of final assembly inside Asia -- so rising imports from the ASEAN countries and the NIEs (Korea, Taiwan)
Higher US tariffs are having an impact on bilateral trade (the US and Chinese data agree on the trend tho not the level of trade) ...
. @sobel_mark has a good piece today for OMFIF making the case that an appreciation of the yuan is a necessary component of any global effort to bring China's surplus down. I of course agree
The deficit in pharmaceuticals is now big ($200b, ~ 1/6th the total deficit ...) and 1/2 of that is with Ireland alone ... (hence the bigger bilateral deficit with Ireland than with Germany this year)
So the goods deficit is still running ahead of its 2024 pace, even without all the pharma craziness ...
The "deals" struck by the deal maker in chief haven't been entirely, well, coherent -- raising tariffs on SE Asia to ~ 20 and some tariffs on Mexico to 25% helped China out, as it reduced the edge of alternative suppliers
The issue, as some already know, is that China changed how it calculates its goods surplus in the middle of the pandemic, moving away from the (reliable, and verifiable from counterparty data) customs data to an "internal" survey ...