According to the bank's aggregate sales balance, the bilateral imbalance was only $30 billion in favor of China but moving in favor of the US.

Trump also repeated on Tuesday what he has said before. "We helped rebuild China," he told the media in a meeting with leaders of several Baltic nations.

"The Chinese people rebuilt China, not outsiders," said Yukon Huang, a senior fellow of the Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

A former World Bank country director for China, Huang said Chinese did this by drawing on their exceptionally high savings rates to fund much needed investments that led to a dramatic increase in productivity.

He said that unlike many other developing countries, China relied relatively little on foreign aid but more on foreign direct investment (FDI) facilitated by the Asian Chinese diaspora.

"The US actually provided relatively little financial support, since only about 1 to 2 percent of America's FDI over the past two decades went to China," Huang said.