Abstract: This study broadens the explanation of regional unbalance in China’s international trade growth. Unlike most studies in this field trying to explore the roots of the unbalanced status from traditional economic theory, this study adopts the interest group theory from political economy, explaining the relationship between regional unbalance of trade development and the State-Owned Enterprises’ (SOEs) growth. The SOEs can be viewed as interest groups trying to influence the government policy making process and did achieve their goal since some SOEs’ leaders are also government officials or formal governmental staffs. Given other economic conditions of one region in a certain period, the regional international trade is generally negatively influenced by the local SOEs’ growth. The empirical tests are conducted with the Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression and Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) regression in the framework of fixed effect model using annual data of 29 provinces in mainland China from 1995 to 2010. The results prove the hypotheses that given other conditions, regional SOEs’ growth contributes negatively to both the corresponding regional foreign trade as a whole as well as import and export as independent components.