How important is China's export - the debate is back

Arthur Kroeber, one of the voices in the export debate  by Fantake via Flickr

The question how important the export is for China's economy has been discussed often, also here, and the ongoing global crisis seems to be a way to test who is right and who is wrong. Officially China's export represents 30 to 40 percent of its GDP. But - and that is the side I take - since much of the exported products have been imported first, the value China's international trade adds is closer to ten percent.
While the decline of China's export over the past year has been dramatic, the effects - including the measured rise in unemployed - are huge but manageable. The number of over 20 million extra unemployed is about the same amount of jobs China has to create in 'normal' times per year to create positions for the new entrants at the labor market.
While it is too early to say that China's economy is back on its way upward, early signs have a positive tendency and papers, like here the Financial Times, are reviving the export debate. The FT quotes pros and cons, but I sill find the following more convincing:

One school of thought has it that the bulk of growth in recent years has been driven by domestic demand rather than exports. Jonathan Anderson, an economist at UBS, argues that only about 8 per cent of the workforce is actually employed in export industries and that, even at the peak of China's recent trade expansion, net exports accounted for only about a sixth of growth. "By any measure, China is one of the least export-exposed economies in Asia," he says.

The article gives the example of Apple's iPod to explain why the export has such a limited impacts on China's economy:

A research paper published last year by economists from the University of California at Berkeley and Irvine mapped the economic value-added from making iPods. Although the product left a Chinese factory with a price of $150 they estimated that only 5 per cent of that value was created in China because important components were imported. Moreover, Chinese workers received only 2 per cent of the wages paid during the product's manufacture.

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