In 2023, under the condition of weak world economic recovery and continued sluggish global growth, China's foreign trade development will withstand the pressure, operate generally stably, and achieve the goal of promoting stability and improving quality. The data shows that in recent months, China's goods have shown a steady upward momentum, and the export volume has changed from a year-on-year decline to an increase since August last year, and the growth rate has continued to expand. In 2023, the total value of imports and exports of goods** will reach 4176 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 02%, import and export offset, **surplus 579 trillion yuan, to achieve a steady and slight increase in the scale of exports, and the quality of foreign trade has been steadily improved.
On December 28, 2023, the locomotive of the "Yixinou" China-Europe train was ready to dock with the body at Yiwu West Railway Station in Zhejiang. (*From China News Service).
For this year's external environment, the first economic work conference judged that "the complexity, severity and uncertainty of the external environment have risen", and required "to accelerate the cultivation of new momentum for foreign trade and consolidate the basic market of foreign trade and foreign investment". Under the new situation, accelerating the cultivation of new momentum for foreign trade is of great significance for promoting the high-quality development of foreign trade, expanding high-level opening up, and consolidating and enhancing the positive trend of economic recovery.
At present, the development of foreign trade is facing many difficulties and challenges, but the positive factors of stability and improvement are still gathering, the potential for improving the quality and efficiency of foreign trade is not small, and the "Belt and Road" brings new growth points, and the green new energy industry presents better competitiveness and digital ** will bring a broader space.
New space: The Belt and Road Initiative has brought new growth points.
2023 marks the 10th anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative, which has received a positive response from the international community and has become a new growth point for China's exports. According to the National Development and Reform Commission, as of the end of June 2023, China has signed more than 200 Belt and Road cooperation documents with 152 countries and 32 international organizations. The scale of economic and trade cooperation has steadily expanded, and according to customs statistics, in 2023, China's imports and exports to the countries that jointly build the "Belt and Road" will be 1947 trillion yuan, an increase of 28%, accounting for 466%, an increase of 12 percentage points.
Over the past ten years, the Belt and Road Initiative has extended from the Eurasian continent to Africa and Latin America, and from hard connectivity to soft connectivity and heart connectivity, building the world's widest and largest international cooperation platform, opening up new space for China's deepening foreign trade development.
On October 18, 2023, at the opening ceremony of the 3rd Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, China announced its support for eight high-quality Belt and Road initiatives, leading the Belt and Road Initiative to a new level of high-quality development.
In the long run, the growth of exports to the Belt and Road countries and ASEAN countries can hedge the decline in exports to advanced economies to a certain extent. In particular, the first expansion of BRICS in 2023 will further enhance China's export potential, and at the same time, more and more countries in Latin America and Africa will join the Belt and Road Initiative, which can reduce the impact of China's declining exports to developed countries.
New products: The green new energy industry shows good competitiveness.
In recent years, China's green development has been strong. In 2022, China's green ** scale ranked third in the world, and it is also the world's largest green** exporter and third largest importer. Green new energy products have become an important driving force for the sustained growth of China's foreign trade.
According to the China Green ** Development Report 2023, China's green ** has basically maintained a growth trend in recent years, with an average annual growth rate of 3 from 2013 to 202218%, an increase of 2 percent in the global share3 percentage points.
In terms of scale, cost, technology, industrial chain and application demonstration, China's green new energy industry has demonstrated strong international competitiveness, and is one of the highlights of China's foreign trade growth in recent years.
For example, the "new three" products represented by new energy vehicles have shown a strong growth trend in foreign trade exports, bringing new vitality to the development of China's foreign trade. According to data from the General Administration of Customs, in 2023, China will export a total of 106 trillion yuan, breaking through the trillion mark for the first time, an increase of 299%。
In addition, China's PV module output has ranked first in the world for 16 consecutive years, with polysilicon, silicon wafers, cells, modules and other production capacity accounting for more than 80% of the world's total, and the export prospects of photovoltaics, lithium batteries and solar cells are bright.
In the next stage, with the scale advantage of China's new energy and the demand for market expansion, benefiting from the continuous promotion of policy support, in the case of green energy products becoming the world's most popular products, the strength and international influence of China's green new energy industry will be further enhanced, and the export growth trend of China's green new energy products is expected to continue.
New model: digital will bring a broader space.
The digital economy is a hot spot in global development. As an important part of the digital economy, digital has also become an important area of international economic and trade cooperation. Digital is a form with data as the key factor of production, digital services as the core, and digital ordering and delivery as the main characteristics.
Digital can be simply divided into two parts, one is the way characterized by digital delivery, and the object is data; The second is the best way characterized by digital ordering, for example, cross-border e-commerce transactions are goods, but they must be realized through digital ordering.
In recent years, the overall scale of China's digital technology has been expanding, the industrial foundation has been continuously consolidated, digital technology has developed rapidly, and the application scenarios have become increasingly rich. Relevant statistics show that in 2023, the scale of China's digital ** will reach 51 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 116%, the scale hit a record high.
In digital delivery, data is the core factor of production. In order to better play the role of data elements, in recent years, China has intensively introduced policies and regulations, and made a series of deployments to accelerate the construction of data basic systems and cultivate data element markets. In December 2022, the Communist Party of China issued the "Opinions on Building a Data Basic System to Better Play the Role of Data Elements", which established the "four beams and eight pillars" of the data basic system system; In September 2023, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) issued the Provisions on Regulating and Facilitating Cross-border Data Flow (Draft for Comments) to further regulate and promote the free flow of data.
In addition, some localities and industries have launched a series of measures to strengthen the supply of high-quality data. For example, Shenzhen proposes to establish a multimodal public dataset to create high-quality Chinese corpus data. The Shenzhen Data Exchange has joined forces with nearly 50 units to establish the "Open Computing Alliance". From the top-level design of the country to the practice of local and industrial circles, China's data element market has entered a period of opportunity for vigorous development, and its empowering role in digital technology has become increasingly significant.
In terms of digital ordering, China's cross-border e-commerce partners have covered the whole world, and it is one of the countries with the most complete cross-border e-commerce ecological chain in the world. In 2023, the import and export volume of China's cross-border e-commerce will reach 238 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 156%, which is higher than the growth rate of foreign trade in the same period. There are more than 100,000 cross-border e-commerce entities and more than 200,000 independent stations in China, and new formats and models such as full custody, AI + cross-border e-commerce, and cross-border e-commerce + industrial belt are developing rapidly.
On the production side, artificial intelligence has become an important starting point for promoting foreign trade innovation and improving the efficiency of cross-border e-commerce, and the "cloud economy" ecology has gradually taken shape. In November 2023, Alibaba's international station officially launched the full-link foreign trade artificial intelligence product "Business Assistant", which is the first artificial intelligence application in China's foreign trade industry, with functions such as intelligent hair products, intelligent reception, and intelligent analysis. At the 29th Yiwu International Commodities (Standard) Expo, Yiwu Commodity City released a large language model in the field of commodities and a newly upgraded digital comprehensive service platform "Yiwu Commodity City ChinaGoodsai" platform to explore the use of artificial intelligence mapping, poster generation, digital human content and artificial intelligence translation, customer service and other applications. Through automatic analysis of massive data, market trends, optimization of chain management, and artificial intelligence to further promote intelligent automation, realize the digital development of the whole chain and all links, help enterprises reduce costs and increase efficiency, better cope with the increasingly complex international economic and trade environment, and promote the high-quality development of cross-border e-commerce.
In the field of consumption, new consumer formats and application scenarios such as online games, education, and telemedicine continue to emerge, which stimulates the development potential of digital technology. According to the "2023 China Game Industry Report" released by the Game Working Committee of the China Audio-video and Digital Publishing Association, the overseas sales revenue of China's self-developed products in 2023 will be 1636.6 billion US dollars, with a scale of more than 100 billion yuan for four consecutive years.
At present, China's digital ** has shown a strong momentum of development, and it is in a critical period of cultivating new momentum for foreign trade through digital **. China's strong digital infrastructure, the huge scale of the digital economy, the active exploration of private enterprises in technology and application, and the support and guidance of policies together constitute a strong driving force for China's digital development. Further promoting the innovation and development of digital ** can not only add stronger impetus to China's construction of a new system of open economy, but also make an important contribution to the development of global digital **. (The author is a deputy to the National People's Congress, a fellow of the International Economic Association, and the president of Liaoning University) (END).
Written by Yu Miaojie.
*: Universal Magazine.