Chinese President Xi Jinping, also General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, has called for accelerating efforts to build China into a strong trading nation by improving the quality of goods trade, promoting innovation in services trade, expanding digital trade and advancing digital and green transformation to move China higher in the global value chain.
Despite a complex and rapidly changing international economic and trade environment, China’s foreign trade maintained strong resilience and steady growth in the first half of this year. The share of new, green and smart products in foreign trade continued to rise, further strengthening China’s competitive advantages in global markets and laying a stronger foundation for building a modern trade powerhouse.
During the first half of the year, the Port of Shanghai maintained its position as the world’s largest container port. More than 6,000 new energy vehicles are being exported daily from the port to over 170 countries and regions worldwide. New energy vehicles, integrated circuits and industrial robots together accounted for nearly 70 percent of the total export value among these products.
At the same time, China’s total import and export volume surpassed 25 trillion yuan for the first time in history, further consolidating its position as the world’s largest country in goods trade.
Against the backdrop of China’s national rejuvenation and profound global changes, President Xi Jinping has provided strategic guidance on building a strong trading nation. As early as 2014, Xi stressed that China should not only remain a major trading country but also transform into a powerful trading nation. He called for consolidating traditional strengths in foreign trade, developing new competitive advantages, expanding trade channels and actively increasing imports.
In the first half of this year, China’s imports exceeded 10 trillion yuan for the first time, representing a 22.1 percent increase compared with the same period last year and surpassing export growth by 8.7 percentage points. During this period, imports from more than 150 countries and regions increased, demonstrating that China’s vast market continues to provide significant opportunities for the global economy.
Facing rapid changes in the international economic and trade landscape, Xi has repeatedly emphasized the need to accelerate structural upgrades in goods trade, promote innovation in services trade, develop new trade models and strengthen the growth of digital and green trade.
The transformation of China’s foreign trade is clearly reflected in trade data. Last year, the share of high-value-added and high-tech electromechanical products in China’s exports exceeded 60 percent for the first time. In the first half of this year, the figure further increased to 63.5 percent.
Taizhou, Jiangsu Province, a national-level ship export hub, is supplying global markets with advanced vessels, including the world’s largest dual-fuel container ships and ultra-large environmentally friendly oil tankers equipped with green energy systems, efficient cargo management technologies and intelligent monitoring capabilities. In the first half of this year, new overseas ship orders from the region increased by more than 70 percent compared with the same period last year.
Meanwhile, Shantou City in Guangdong Province, a traditional manufacturing hub, has developed new pathways for expanding high-value-added digital services in global markets. Overseas users can now access large language models and computing services developed in Shantou. By late April, daily usage had averaged around 100 million tokens, but that figure has now grown to several billion tokens.
Today, China has become one of the world’s leading exporters of knowledge-based services. High-value-added and technology-driven “Chinese services” are rapidly expanding into international markets, creating new competitive advantages in global services trade.
Source: Shishir-Foysal-Akash, China Media Group (CMG).