BEIJING — The Chinese economy grew 4.5 percent last quarter, and the country’s 1.4 billion people are reportedly not happy about it, in the sense that they did not do it.

Growth accelerated from 4.3 percent in the spring, and the first nine months of the year came in at 4.6 percent, comfortably inside the government’s target of 4.5 to 5 percent, according to figures released Monday. The engine of the miracle is exports — selling to everyone else, at a pace economists are politely calling “a drag on world growth,” which is the phrase professionals use when a country wins an argument by leaving.

Domestic consumption stayed weak. The property sector kept slumping. The households kept saving. The ships kept leaving.

Liang Meifang has worked export coordination at the Ningbo-Zhoushan port authority for nineteen years, and she has coordinated forty-one consecutive months of records. Her title is deputy chief. Her job is to load ships. Her boss’s job, as she describes it, is “to not buy anything.”

“People ask me if the workers here buy the toasters,” Liang said. “I tell them: the workers here make the toasters. The toasters are for Ohio. This is not a punishment. This is a schedule.”

Liang has never bought a washing machine. She exports them. She said the distinction “brings her peace.”

THE GROWTH SCORECARD, AT A GLANCE

  • Q3 GDP: plus 4.5 percent year over year, up from 4.3 percent in Q2
  • Exports: carrying the entire economy, as has been well-documented
  • Households: saving
  • Property: slumping
  • The IMF: trimmed its 2026 forecast to exactly 4.5 percent — the number China has already hit — a move analysts described as the least stressful forecast ever published

Liang’s shift begins at 4 a.m. and ends when the last container is sealed. She said she has “no opinion” on the trade talks, then said, “I have a great opinion, it is just not for the phone.” She has been told her port is the largest in the world by container volume, a fact she received “without celebration.” She keeps a laminated photograph of a container ship on her desk, which she describes as her retirement.

The growth figures landed the same week American officials finished describing the export boom as a problem for everyone who buys things, a sentence NBC rendered more plainly as a “drag on world growth.”

Asked what she thought would happen if Chinese families started buying everything China makes, Liang considered the question for a long time.

“Then who buys the toasters?” she said. “Ohio? Ohio cannot even make a toaster. This is the whole plan. The plan is that we make, and they talk, and the ships leave.”

The plan, as of Monday, is at 4.5.