2024 China's Foreign Trade: Stable Volume, Quality, and Accelerating New Momentum

Experts said that against the backdrop of increasing external pressure, my country's foreign trade as a whole maintained a momentum of "quality improvement" last year, and the trade structure continued to be optimized.

In 2024, my country's foreign trade new formats and models will have many highlights, and cross-border e-commerce imports and exports will maintain double-digit growth, which is higher than the overall growth rate of foreign trade. Export markets will "bloom in many places". ASEAN is my country's largest trading partner; the EU is my country's second largest trading partner; my country's exports to countries participating in the construction of the "Belt and Road" continue to increase.

Experts said that with the solid implementation of a series of measures, from trade structure to market layout, from business entities to regional patterns, my country's foreign trade highlights will continue to emerge in 2024:

my country's exports of mechanical and electrical products hit a record high in the same period in history;

General trade exports accounted for more than 65%;

The export share of private enterprises increased significantly by about 1 percentage point.

Liang Ming, Director of the Foreign Trade Research Institute of the Ministry of Commerce: General trade is a very important indicator of our independent development of foreign trade. Its continuous improvement shows that our foreign trade autonomy has been further improved. At the same time, the export growth of our private enterprises is also relatively large, which shows the resilience of our exports.

Experts said that my country's foreign trade exports showed strong resilience in 2024. According to the latest data from the World Trade Organization, China's exports contributed more than 30% to world exports in the first three quarters of 2024. At the same time, my country's exports continued to increase their share of the international market.

Liang Ming, Director of the Institute of Foreign Trade of the Ministry of Commerce Research Institute: For the whole year of 2024, we predict that China's export share of the international market will reach 14.5%, an increase of 0.4 percentage points, which has reached a new high close to the previous period. China is still the largest force driving world export growth.