China Says its Foreign Trade Remains Lopsided, Seeks Balance

China's foreign trade remains unbalanced and has "unsustainable" components, a white paper released by the government Wednesday states.

As export growth continues to rely heavily on energy and resource-intensive undertakings, the government will develop trade in services to encourage a more balanced development, the paper said.

China's surplus in trade in goods mainly comes from foreign-invested enterprises and processing trade. In 2010, surplus generated by foreign-invested enterprises reached $124.3 billion, representing 68.4 per cent of the total surplus of China's trade in goods.

To create the equilibrium, China will continue to cultivate new competitive advantages in technology, branding, quality and services, as well as stimulate industrial transformation and upgrading, the paper said.

Due to efforts to promote balanced foreign trade, China's surplus in trade in goods has been decelerating since 2009. The proportion of surplus in the total import and export trade volume and the GDP has also dropped since 2008, according to the white paper.

China's contribution to the global economy grew to 9.3 per cent last year from less than 4 per cent a decade ago.

Meanwhile, China has announced it will focus more on increasing imports while maintaining stable export levels.

The country has imported an annual average of $750 billion in goods and created more than 14 million jobs for its trading partners over the past decade, said the official Xinhua News, quoting data from the Ministry of Commerce.

China's imports will amount to $8 trillion over the next five years. Retail sales will likely hit $4.89 trillion U.S. dollars.