English

By Fei Xie

China's Trade Surplus Narrows for the first Half of 2018, a spokesman of the General Administration of Customs (GAC) said today at a news conference.

According to official statistics, China's trade surplus narrowed to 901.32 billion yuan ($135.4 billion) in the first half of the year, down by 26.7 percent from the same period a year earlier.

In the period from January to June, China's exports rose by 4.9 percent from a year ago in yuan, and imports expanded by 11.5 percent in yuan, said the GAC.

Besides, GAC also released the data for trading activities between China and the U.S. China's total trading volume to the U.S reached up to RMB 1,930 billion, which had increased 5.2 percent on a year-on-year basis, this accounts for 13.7 percent of the total foreign trade. China's exports in the first half of this year reached  RMB1,390 billion, a rise of 5.7 precent when compared to the same period last year.

"The reason for the relatively fast trade growth was a result of a mild global economic recovery that has given rise to robust trading activities, as well as a sound development of the domestic economy, which has strengthened demand for imports"  said  Song Ping Huang, the spokesman of the GAC.

Besides, he said that the steady progress in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and stronger trading activities with emerging markets also contributed to the trade growth, as the trade volume with the Belt and Road countries had been boosted significantly, at 2.5 percentage points, which is faster than the overall increase for the January-June period.