Currently, facing the complex and severe domestic and international environment, China's foreign trade development is stable and improving in quality, showing strong resilience, and the long-term positive fundamentals have not changed. In the first half of this year, China's foreign trade import and export scale exceeded 20 trillion yuan for the first time in the same period in history. Among them, the first and second quarters reached 9.76 trillion yuan and 10.34 trillion yuan respectively, achieving positive growth year-on-year. From a month on month perspective, imports and exports in the second quarter increased by 6% compared to the first quarter. In the first seven months of this year, China's total import and export value reached 23.55 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 0.4%.
China's foreign trade can withstand various pressures and achieve overall stable operation, and the national policy of stabilizing foreign trade provides strong support. In response to the challenges faced by foreign trade enterprises in expanding the international market, such as information asymmetry, difficult and expensive financing, and unsmooth customs clearance, the country has made top-level design and formulated corresponding policy measures. In April 2023, the General Office of the State Council issued the "Opinions on Promoting Stable Scale and Optimal Structure of Foreign Trade", emphasizing the need to strengthen trade promotion and expand markets, stabilize and expand the scale of key product imports and exports, increase fiscal and financial support, accelerate innovative development of foreign trade, optimize the environment for foreign trade development, and other aspects to ensure the achievement of the goal of promoting stable and high-quality import and export.
Expanding the international market provides a market foundation for the stable operation of foreign trade. Since the beginning of this year, many local governments have actively organized foreign trade enterprises to go abroad, seize opportunities, participate in overseas exhibitions, and seek business opportunities. While consolidating mature markets such as the United States and the European Union, they have also expanded into emerging markets such as ASEAN, Latin America, and West Africa, helping foreign trade enterprises stabilize orders and solidify the foundation of foreign trade. In addition, the spillover effects of domestic exhibitions have once again become apparent. The holding of large-scale exhibitions such as the China International Consumer Goods Expo, China Import and Export Fair, and China Central and Eastern European Countries Expo has attracted some overseas potential customers to conduct on-site visits to domestic enterprises, helping foreign trade enterprises increase orders.
The promotion of high-level opening-up has provided strong momentum for the stable operation of foreign trade. China has promoted the "the Belt and Road" initiative and expanded the "circle of friends" of China's foreign trade. In the first half of this year, China's import and export to countries along the "the Belt and Road" increased by 9.8%, 7.7 percentage points higher than the overall growth rate. On June 2nd, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement officially came into effect for the Philippines, marking the full entry into force of RCEP for 15 signatory countries and promoting trade between China and ASEAN and RCEP member countries. China has been aligning with international high standard economic and trade rules, steadily expanding institutional openness, accelerating the construction of free trade zones and free trade ports, promoting customs clearance facilitation, and promoting the liberalization of goods trade, providing institutional guarantees for the development of China's foreign trade.
The rapid development of new formats and models in foreign trade has expanded the growth space. Cross border e-commerce and other new formats have established reliable supply and demand platforms, becoming a new choice for foreign trade enterprises, which is conducive to expanding trade channels, reducing transaction costs, and helping to "buy the world" and "sell the world". Cross border e-commerce platforms also provide full process and one-stop services for small and medium-sized foreign trade enterprises in the import and export process, increasing the possibility of their participation in international trade and promoting the diversification of China's foreign trade business entities.
Overall, China's foreign trade industry and supply chain have strong resilience, with a complete industrial system, complete industrial supporting facilities, strong industrial organization and production capabilities. At the same time, the industry is constantly upgrading and gradually climbing towards the high-end position of the global value chain, which has maintained strong international competitiveness of China's goods, driven the growth of commodity exports, and also maintained strong demand for imports of resources, energy, intermediate goods, machinery and equipment.
In order to ensure the stable development of China's foreign trade, strengthen the resilience of foreign trade, strengthen the service guarantee work of opening up export markets, do everything possible to consolidate the export markets of developed countries, and actively open up developing countries, countries along the "the Belt and Road", ASEAN and other markets. We attach great importance to stabilizing the export of electromechanical products, with a focus on the export situation and changes of the "new three types" of electric passenger vehicles, lithium batteries, and solar cells.
In terms of imports, pay attention to changes in the prices and quantities of bulk commodity imports to ensure the stability of bulk commodity imports. Accelerate the revision and encouragement of imported technology and product catalogs, further improve the accuracy of import subsidy policies, and guide enterprises to expand the import of advanced technology and equipment that are in short supply domestically. Orderly promote the pilot work of landing and processing imported goods for border trade, and increase imports from neighboring countries.
In terms of new business models and formats, we support foreign trade enterprises to expand new trade channels through cross-border e-commerce and other channels, develop models such as "cross-border e-commerce+industrial belt" and "cross-border e-commerce+characteristic products", promote innovative development of cross-border e-commerce, and expand new space for the development of foreign trade enterprises.
In terms of trade policies, encourage banks to increase their financing support for foreign trade enterprises. Expand the scale and coverage of export credit insurance coverage, optimize underwriting and claims conditions. Based on the new changes in the development of foreign trade and the actual demands of enterprises, adjust and improve relevant policies to further enhance the effectiveness of foreign trade policy combinations.
