CHINA’S total trade reached 32.33 trillion yuan ($4.57 trillion) in the first three quarters of 2024, setting a record high with an increase of 5.3 percent year on year, the General Administration of Customs (GAC) said on Monday, noting that foreign trade maintained steady growth and the trade structure continued to optimize.
While external and internal challenges remain, there is still a solid foundation for China’s foreign trade to maintain stable growth in the final quarter of the year, thanks to the growing competitiveness of Chinese products and strong policy support, officials and experts said.
As exports remain one of the biggest growth drivers for China’s economy, strong growth in the fourth quarter of 2024 will continue to provide strong support to ensure that overall economic growth will remain stable, experts noted.
Strong growth
In the first three quarters, China’s total exports amounted to 18.62 trillion yuan, growing by 6.2 percent year on year, while imports reached 13.71 trillion yuan, an increase of 4.1 percent, according to officials at a GAC press conference on Monday.
“Overall, China’s foreign trade operations remained stable in the first three quarters, with exports and imports both showing growth,” Wang Lingjun, deputy head of the GAC, told the press conference.
Wang said that while the domestic and international environments are becoming more complex and China’s foreign trade development faces some challenges, the fundamentals of China’s economy, along with its vast market, strong resilience and great potential, remain unchanged.
“As current policies and new measures continue to take effect, positive factors for foreign trade development have accumulated. There is a strong foundation for steady growth in imports and exports in the fourth quarter,” Wang said.
Zhou Maohua, an economist with China Everbright Bank, told the Global Times on Wednesday that despite an increasingly complex external environment, China’s foreign trade in the first three quarters performed “better than expected,” and played a supportive role for economic growth.
Beyond the strong growth in total trade, there were many highlights in China’s imports and exports in the first three quarters of 2024.
China’s trade with the Belt and Road Initiative partners hit 15.21 trillion yuan, an increase of 6.3 percent year on year in the first three quarters, accounting for 47.1 percent of China’s total foreign trade during this period, according to the GAC.
China’s trade with other members of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership increased by 4.5 percent in the first three quarters, while that with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations surged by 9.4 percent.
Meanwhile, China’s private enterprises achieved an import and export volume of 17.78 trillion yuan in the first three quarters, marking a growth of 9.4 percent year on year, which was 4.1 percentage points higher than the national average growth, according to the GAC. Private companies contributed 93.8 percent to China’s overall trade growth, continuously injecting new vitality into the nation’s foreign trade development, the GAC data showed.
Underscoring China’s continuously optimizing trade structure, over the first three quarters, exports of the “new three” items electric vehicles (EVs), lithium batteries and photovoltaic products reached 757.83 billion yuan, accounting for 4.1 percent of total export value, according to the GAC.
Amid China’s surging exports of EVs and other advanced products, some countries have sought to impose protectionist restrictions. At the Monday press conference, Lü Daliang, a GAC spokesman, said that the imposition of tariffs by some countries is an unfair and unreasonable practice of trade protectionism.
China’s export of the “new three” items not only enriches global supply and alleviates inflationary pressure but also significantly contributes to global efforts to combat climate change and promote green transformation, Lü said.
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