In the first three quarters of 2018, China’s service trade enjoyed a generally stable development with the structure optimized continuously, quality and benefit enhanced obviously and high quality development promoted steadily. In January-September, China’s import and export of service totaled 3882.53billion yuan (RMB, the same below), up 10.5% year on year. Among these, the export was 1274.34 billion trillion yuan, up 14%; the import was 2608.19 billion yuan, up 8.9%; the trade deficit was 1.33384 trillion yuan. In terms of US dollars, the growth rates of import-export, export, and import was 15.2%, 18.8% and 13.6% respectively. The features are mainly as follows:

High quality development of economy promoted the rapid growth of import and export of service. Since the beginning of this year, the stable and favorable trend of domestic economy has been consolidated continuously, and the successively introduced opening up measures and service trade policies obviously promoted the quality of economic development, strengthened the endogenous power of foreign trade development, and provided strong supports to the development of China’s service trade.

The rapid development of emerging services drove the continuous optimization of the structure of service trade. In January-September, the import and export of emerging services totaled 1279.9 billion yuan, up 20.1%, 9.6 percentage points higher than the overall growth of the import and export of services, and drove the proportion of import and export of emerging services up 2.7 percentage points to 33%. Among these, the export of emerging services was 664.86 billion yuan, up 25% with the proportion in service export reaching 52.2%, 4.6 percentage points higher than that in the same period last year; the import of emerging services was 615.04 billion yuan, up 15.2%, with the proportion in the import of services reaching 23.6%, 1.3 percentage points higher than that in the same period last year.

The rapid growth of export of knowledge-intensive services enhanced China’s export competitiveness constantly. In January-September, export of services kept a higher growth trend than that of the import, and the growth rate of export of services was 5.1 percentage points higher than that of the import. Among these, the export of knowledge-intensive services like insurance service, telecommunication, computer and information services all realized the rapid growth over 20%. The fast growth of export of knowledge-intensive services showed that China’s competitiveness of service export was promoted obviously, and the influence of the national brand of “China Service” and the new advantages of international competition was further strengthened.

Economic transformation and upgrading accelerated the rapid growth of import of high-end productive services. In January-September, the import of high-end productive services like financial service and Intellectual property royalties realized a rapid growth of over 20% with the growth rate reaching 22.1% and 24% respectively. The rapid growth of high-end productive services showed that, with the accelerating of supply-side structural reform and the transformation and upgrading of manufacturing industry, China’s consumption for productive services accelerated its upgrading, and the demands for high-end productive services have been existing continuously.