The Mini Decline Will Rebound

More stable growth in foreign trade is on the cards

Despite a year-on-year decline of 0.9 percent in 2016, China has performed satisfactorily in trade in the first two months of this year, casting a hopeful light on the country’s foreign trade prospects for 2017.

According to statistics from the General Administration of Customs, the total value of China’s imports and exports amounted to 3.89 trillion yuan ($564.9 billion) in the first two months of 2017, up 20.6 percent year on year. More specifically, exports reached 2.09 trillion yuan ($303.5 billion), a year-onyear increase of 11 percent, and imports stood at 1.8 trillion yuan ($261.4 billion), a year-on-year increase of 34.2 percent, with the trade surplus narrowing from the same period last year by 46.1 percent to 293.65 billion yuan ($42.64 billion).

“Generally speaking, people have good reasons to be cautiously optimistic about the future trend of China’s foreign trade,” said Zhou Junsheng, a financial commentator. Zhou noted that China’s foreign trade will maintain positive growth in tandem with the slow recovery of the international market.

What’s worth mentioning is that the country’s imports surpassed its exports by 60.36 billion yuan ($8.77 billion) in February, marking the first trade deficit since February 2014.

The deficit occurred mainly because of the Spring Festival holiday (January 27 to February 2), Bai Ming, Deputy Director of the International Market Research Division under the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation (CAITEC), told the 21st Century Business Herald.

“Companies always rush and finish the export orders and avoid placing import orders before the seven-day holiday, in order to save inventory costs,” said Bai.

Despite that, there is no denying that import values in February experienced a dramatic surge of 44.7 percent year on year.

Bai attributed the trend to the soaring price of bulk commodity imports as well as the remarkable increase in import volume. In February, China imported 83.49 million tons of iron ore and ore concentrate and 31.78 million tons of crude oil, up 13.4 percent and