BEIJING, Nov. 26 (Xinhua) -- Since the beginning of 2020, China has focused on stabilizing foreign trade while working on COVID-19 epidemic prevention and control and achieved positive results including a reappeared stable growth of China's import and export which is better than expected, according to China's Ministry of Commerce.
China has adhered to improving the business environment at ports, facilitating foreign trade, actively opening up the market and expanding imports to cultivate new advantages in foreign trade which has stabilized the basic foreign trade market and achieved the increase in both trade volume and market share, hitting record highs.
From January to October, China saw a total import and export volume exceeding 25.95 trillion yuan, with a year-on-year increase of 1.1 percent, hitting a new record high in the same period of previous years.
-- Stabilize the market entities and optimize the policy environment to "relieve pressure"
Stability is the foundation of development and decides the overall situation of foreign trade. As long as the market entities of foreign trade can be stabilized, foreign trade will certainly be stable.
At present, there are more than 400,000 foreign trade entities in China which have been impacted by the epidemic and have encountered unprecedented challenges.
Since the beginning of 2020, a series of foreign trade policies have been implemented by China, including continuously optimizing the business environment at ports, facilitating customs clearance, and promoting the construction of Hainan Free Trade Port, which have stabilized the enterprises' confidence and market expectations.
The combination of policy and service effectively has helped enterprises deal with the adverse impact of the epidemic. China's foreign trade still enjoys strong resilience and competitiveness, and foreign trade enterprises have strong innovation awareness and market development ability. The long-term development trend of foreign trade has not changed.
-- Strengthen innovation and speed up new business development to "give more impetus"
In recent years, China has further consolidated the foundation for the high-quality development of foreign trade, and improved its endogenous driving force. New types of businesses such as cross-border e-commerce and market procurement trade have developed rapidly and become the new driving force for the steady growth of foreign trade which have achieved double-digit growth for six consecutive years, becoming a new growth spot in foreign trade and a new driving force for high-quality development.
Affected by the COVID-19, traditional foreign trade has been seriously affected, but cross-border e-commerce has released huge potential for development, showing its leading role in foreign trade innovation and development.
In the first half of 2020, the total value of imports and exports of cross-border e-commerce online transactions exceeded 600 billion yuan, with an increase of 6.7 percent, significantly higher than the overall import and export growth rate during the same period.
-- Promote facilitation and optimize the business environment to "activate vitality"
Optimizing business environment is a must to achieve high-quality development of foreign trade. In recent years, China has successively issued several measures to optimize the port business environment and facilitate cross-border trade development, actively create an international business environment based on market and rule of law to facilitate foreign trade.
The measures adopted to optimize the operation process include deepening the reform of nationwide integration of customs clearance procedures to let enterprises declare at any customs service department and any port in the country, opening a "green channel" for rapid customs clearance of agricultural and sideline products, building a "single-window system" for international trade to clear the goods at any port across the country, further improving the catalogue system, strengthening the market guidance and industry standards, and carrying out the rectification of illegal charges in port services.
Looking forward to the future, China will continue to optimize the foreign investment environment, provide high-quality public services and fair competition environment for domestic and foreign-funded enterprises, accelerate the implementation of the new version of the negative list of foreign investment access, and further stimulate the vitality of foreign trade.
(Edited by Gao Jingyan with Xinhua Silk Road, gaojingyan@xinhua.org)
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