Service trade fair concludes 
2019-06-03
The five-day 2019 China International Fair for Trade in Services drew the curtains on Saturday in Beijing, with intended contracts worth US$105 billion signed.
The contracts involving financial services, communication services, cultural services and legal services signal China’s upbeat momentum in the non-manufacturing sector.
China’s service trade has seen continuous expansion with a better structure, Ma Jiantang, secretary of the leading members’ group of the Communist Party of China at the Development Research Center of the State Council, told the fair.
In 2018, the import and export volume of knowledge-intensive trade in services saw an increase of 20.7 percent year on year, much higher than the overall service trade growth, according to Ma.
The share of knowledge-intensive trade in the country’s total service trade went up 2.5 percentage points than the previous year, while the proportion of traditional service trade, including tourism, transportation and construction, fell 2.2 percentage points.
Ma believed that the future development of China’s service trade will depend on the opening-up of the industry.
China will provide institutional guarantees to the service industry and give full play to the role of the market while attaching greater importance to the application of innovations and the protection of intellectual property, he added.
Over the week, the world’s largest services trade fair hosted 240 forums and business talks, which occupied nearly all major conference venues in the Chinese capital.
Yan Ligang, the fair’s spokesperson, said more than 120,000 visitors from 137 countries and regions and 21 international organizations participated in the fair.
