In the first eight months of the year, China's foreign trade increased 17.6% to 34.78 trillion, sustaining double-digit growth and highlighting the country's resilience despite a sluggish global trade recovery and geopolitical conflicts disrupting global industrial and supply chains. Exports reached CNY20.17 trillion, up 14.6% year-on-year, while imports stood at CNY14.61 trillion, rising 22%. In August alone, foreign trade grew 19.8%, with import growth outpacing export growth for the sixth consecutive month, according to China's General Administration of Customs (GAC). Lü Daliang, Director of the GAC's Department of Statistics and Analysis, said that China's goods trade maintained steady growth momentum in August. In terms of scale, the country's foreign trade value exceeded CNY4.5 trillion for three consecutive months. In terms of growth rate, both exports and imports have registered double-digit year-on-year growth for four straight months. These figures fully demonstrate the resilience of China's complete industrial system in underpinning foreign trade, as well as the strong impetus of technological innovation in boosting trade performance, Lü said.
Meanwhile, as the year-on-year growth rate of imports has outpaced that of exports for six consecutive months, China's super-large market has provided and will continue to provide vast opportunities for exporters from all over the world, Chinese analysts noted. Due to the rapid development of the global artificial intelligence (AI) industry, China's integrated circuit (IC) imports and exports both registered year-on-year growth during the period. High-value-added products have become a key driver of China's foreign trade, underscoring the country's continued progress in manufacturing transformation and upgrading, Chinese experts said. China's IC exports for the January-August period totaled USD256.75 billion, up 103.9% year-on-year, while imports recorded an increase of 61.7%. Exports of automatic data processing equipment and their parts also surged 49.4% year-on-year.
“As advances in large language model technology and the development of AI agents accelerate, global demand for computing power and storage is expanding rapidly. This is driving growth across the overall IC market and, in turn, significantly boosting China's exports and imports of related products,” Hu Qimu, Professor at the Maritime Silk Road Institute of Huaqiao University told the Global Times. Technology Analyst Xiang Ligang highlighted two major advantages in the country's IC industry. “The first is strong infrastructure-building capacity: the continued expansion of domestic fabs in recent years has made the IC supply chain increasingly complete, laying a solid foundation for the sector's growth. The second is technological advancement: more advanced process technologies have lowered production costs and sharpened China's international competitiveness,” Xiang told the Global Times.
