“China’s import and export data have improved” and “the decline has narrowed and is better than expected”… In the past few days, foreign media such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have intensively reported on China’s new foreign trade data, and “improvement” has become a keyword. In the first eight months of this year, China’s total import and export value of goods trade was 27.08 trillion yuan. Although it dropped slightly by 0.1% year-on-year, the scale was still at a historical high for the same period. Faced with the current sluggish global economic and trade growth, rising protectionism, and sluggish external demand market, it is not easy for China’s foreign trade to maintain smooth operation.
According to a report by The Washington Post in June this year, the World Bank released a report stating that the global economy is slowing down sharply. Global economic growth this year is expected to drop from 3.1% in 2022 to 2.1%, and will remain “weak” next year. . Under such circumstances, China’s foreign trade has shown strong resilience. The export scale has achieved month-on-month growth for three consecutive months. Compared with June and July, the decline in import and export in August has narrowed, sending a signal of stabilization. It should be noted that China’s foreign trade is currently experiencing pressures, ups and downs, and challenges, but new foreign trade products and new business formats are also showing ample momentum.
China’s foreign trade export structure is better. In the first eight months of this year, technology-intensive and high-value-added industries represented by electromechanical products were full of momentum. Among them, the export of automobiles was 442.7 billion yuan, an increase of 104.4%, and the performance was very impressive. The New York Times reported that the total export value of China’s automobile industry has quadrupled in just three years, surpassing Japan this year and becoming the world’s largest automobile exporter. CNN published a report titled “Electric Vehicles Launched by Chinese Automakers Sweeping the World” stating that in the first half of this year, Chinese companies exported nearly 350,000 electric vehicles to nine European countries, exceeding In terms of export volume for the whole of 2022, the EU’s imports of Chinese cars have quadrupled in the past five years. China’s foreign trade structure continues to be optimized and upgraded, reflecting the new trend of high-quality development of the Chinese economy.
The long-term fundamentals of China’s economy have not changed. Coupled with a good industrial system and complete production capacity, the development of foreign trade has sufficient resilience and room for maneuver. At the same time, China insists on opening up to the outside world, actively promotes international economic and trade cooperation, and has successively introduced a series of policies and measures to stabilize foreign trade. There is reason to expect that the comprehensive effects will continue to appear.