China Daily:

How to understand the recovery of China's foreign trade in the first half of this year? You mentioned that the global economy has grown, and the international trade environment has become better, which combined to promote a faster recovery of China's foreign trade. What's your view on the situation in the latter half of this year? What's your expectation on China's foreign trade performance?

Qian Keming:

As I just said, China's foreign trade posted a good performance in the first half of this year. The recovery should be attributed to several factors.

First, the international market has recovered. This year, the world economy has been growing at a faster pace, promoting major international organizations to raise expectations on global economic development. The IMF predicted that world economic growth will reach 3.5 percent this year, up by 0.3 percentage points from last year, reaching the highest level in three years.

Global demand has also rebounded. According to the WTO, in the first five months of this year, the imports of 71 economies, which combined to contribute more than 90 percent of global trade volumes, increased by 10.2 percent. Specifically, the import demand of the United States, the EU and Japan increased by 7.6 percent, 8 percent and 11.2 percent respectively. The imports of BRICKS countries, excluding China, increased by 24.5 percent, while the imports of China increased by 25.7 percent. As a result, China's exports to most foreign markets have rebounded. So far this year, our exports have increased by 15 percent.

Second, our policies have achieved good results. Since 2013, the State Council has released 16 documents to launch policies in favor of foreign trade development. Efforts have been made to enhance policy supports, relieve corporate burdens, improve trade facilitation, and accelerate the development of new businesses. All regions and departments concerned have effectively implemented these policies to help relieve corporate burdens and help Chinese companies to explore the global market.

Third, the cardinality in the same period in last year was relatively low. In 2015 and 2016, both imports and exports of our country kept declining. Calculated in RMB, the scale of exports and imports of 2016 decreased 7.9 percent against 2014. The big rise this year represents a rebound from the low-point. At present, both the domestic and foreign environment for foreign trade are generally favorable, so we are confident in realizing the goals set out in the government work report.

Yet, there are still some uncertainties. Generally speaking, the base for global economic recovery is not yet firm enough, especially with trade protectionism beginning to emerge. Besides, as the costs of various domestic factors keep rising, orders and industries are still moving very fast to areas beyond China. So, in the next half year, foreign trade development still faces many difficulties and challenges. The task will be very hard to maintain the trend of imports and exports moving back a stable level and then becoming even more positive.

As the next step, the Ministry of Commerce will carry out the opening up policy under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, deepen supply-side structural reform in the foreign trade area, continue to ensure the effective implementation of various policies and measures issued by the State Council to stabilize growth and adjust the foreign trade structure, speed up China's innovation-driven development, deeply promote the "Five Optimizations" and "Three Constructions", promote innovative development of the processing trade, keep devoting greater efforts to cultivate new types of foreign trade operations, further improve trade facilitation, reinforce and enhance the traditional advantages of foreign trade, actively foster new advantages in foreign trade competition, try hard to restore stability in foreign trade and then move on to a more positive trend. Thanks.

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