English English

By Yin Lei

China’s foreign trade volume from January to July registered a record high for this period, up by 8.6 percent to RMB 16.72 trillion, or USD 2.61 trillion, as revealed by the latest statistical update from the Ministry of Commerce.

This rate is 3.8 percentage points higher than the average foreign trade growth of the 30 major economies as released by the World Trade Organization (WTO).

During these seven months, China’s exports expanded by five percent year-on-year to RMB 8.89 trillion and imports by 12.9 percent to RMB 7.83 trillion, resulting in a 30.6-percent decrease in its trade surplus, which stood at RMB 1.07 trillion.

Provinces in the central and western part of China saw their imports and exports up by 15 percent, which pushed their share in China’ foreign trade up by 0.9 percentage point to 15.6 percent.

Private companies witnessed 7.6 percent growth in their exports, accounting for 47.7 percent of China’s total exports, up by 1.2 percentage points. General trade registered 12.7 percent expansion in imports and exports, boosting its share in China’s foreign trade by 2.1 percentage points to 58.9 percent.

Chinese goods and services were entering the emerging countries at a faster rate, aside from the traditional markets of the U.S., Europe and Japan. For the past seven months, China’s foreign trade expanded by 12.4 percent with the other three BRICs members of Brazil, Russia and India, and by 11.3 percent with the Belt and Road countries.

The composition of China’s exports maintained improvements, with mechanical and electrical products seeing a share of 58.3 percent, up by one percentage point. These products enjoyed 6.8 percent expansion in exports by the end of July. Among them, exports of automobiles, cell phones and computers went up by 17.9 percent, 8.9 percent and 5.2 percent respectively.

Along with the robust imports, tariffs collected by China for the first half of 2018 grew by 8.9 percent to RMB 997.4 billion, making up 10.9 percent of its tax revenue for the same period.