China’s rapid rise on the global economic stage has substantial and unequal employment effects in advanced industrialised democracies given China’s large volume of low-wage labour. Thus far, these effects have not been analysed in the comparative political economy literature. Building on pooled time-series data, we analyse the effects of Chinese trade competition across 17 sectors in 18 countries. We devote attention to a new channel, increased competition from China in foreign export markets. Our empirical findings reveal overall employment declines in sectors more exposed to Chinese imports. Furthermore, our results suggest that employment effects are not equally shared across skill levels, as the share of hours worked worsen for low-skilled workers