China has entered a time where service trade plays the main role in economic development, officials of the Chinese Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) said Thursday.
The comment was made at a press conference in Beijing on Thursday, the day before the commencement of the high-profile service trade fair – China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS).
There is a huge demand for various services in China and the import of services has been growing quickly for the past few years, leading to a large number of trade deficits for the country, said Xian Guoyi, an officer from the Ministry of Commerce.
But he added the deficit will not change China's determination to continue deepening opening-up in the field of service trading though, and that China still looks forward to importing more premier services from the world.
On the other hand, the deficit resulted from trades of services had been decreasing in 2019 and the first seven months in 2020, as China makes an effort to export more services.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, global service businesses this year have been clearly impacted, including China, whose gross scale of service trading has somewhat decreased.
Nonetheless, due to China's effective containment of the virus so far, trade of services in China showed a steady trend in the first seven months of 2020.
China's service exports in July increased by 3.3 percent. It is the second time the exports of services from China in a month have grown since the COVID-19 outbreak. It is also the only country that has seen growth in service-related trades since March.
In the first seven months of 2020, the deficit of service trades decreased by 49.4 percent to 448.8 billion yuan (65.61 billion U.S. dollars), which is 438.4 billion yuan (64.09 billion U.S. dollars) less than the same period last year.
Imports and exports of knowledge-intense services have seen a larger percentage in the structure of service trading.
For the first seven months, the overall amount of this kind reached 1.15 trillion yuan (168.13 billion U.S. dollars), which accounts for 44 percent of all service trades and is 9.7 percent higher than the year before.
