CBN丨China's foreign trade remains stable despite external pressures: commerce minister

摘要：Despite mounting external pressures, China's foreign trade has remained generally stable this year, demonstrating strong resilienc

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China's commerce ministry holds meeting with trade companies, vows full support for firms to overcome difficulties;The PBOC and four other authorities announced 30 measures to boost Nansha’s role in GBA finance opening-up.

Here’s what you need to know about China in the past 24 hours

Despite mounting external pressures, China's foreign trade has remained generally stable this year, demonstrating strong resilience, said China's top commerce official.

During his meeting with 12 foreign trade companies and representatives from six business chambers, as well as trade experts in Beijing on Monday, Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao said that in response to the United States' unwarranted imposition of high tariffs on Chinese products, China took firm countermeasures to defend its national interests and uphold international fairness and justice - actions that have earned broad international respect.

Recent high-level economic and trade talks between China and the US reached important consensus and made substantial progress, laying the foundation and creating conditions for further bridging differences and deepening cooperation, the commerce minister said.

The two countries announced a series of tariff adjustment measures aimed at easing trade tensions on Monday, after a two-day high-level meeting on economic and trade affairs in Switzerland, according to a joint statement issued by both governments in Geneva.

Looking ahead, the commerce ministry will coordinate domestic economic efforts with international economic and trade challenges, and work together with relevant departments to fully support foreign trade enterprises in overcoming difficulties. It will provide more support to help foreign trade enterprises expand markets and promote the stable development of foreign trade.

According to the General Administration of Customs, in the first four months of 2025, China's total value of goods trade reached 14.14 trillion yuan, an increase of 2.4 percent year-on-year against the backdrop of a complex and volatile global economic environment.

China on Tuesday announced to offer a visa-free policy to five countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and will expand the policy to cover more regional countries in due course.

GBA express

China on Monday announced measures to bolster the opening-up of the financial sector of the Greater Bay Area through stepped-up support for Nansha, one of the three areas in the Guangdong Pilot Free Trade Zone. The 30 key measures, jointly announced by five Chinese departments, including the central bank, cover areas including improving financial services for innovation and entrepreneurship, strengthening financial support in social and livelihood sectors, developing specialized financial services, advancing interconnectivity in the GBA financial markets, conducting cross-border financial innovation and exchanges, and enhancing financial regulatory mechanisms. The package also includes steps to ease cross-border financing, settlements, futures trading, and equity investment, further boosting Nansha’s role as a springboard for Chinese firms going global.Hong Kong passport holders will enjoy immediate visa-free entry to Qatar for stays of up to 30 days, removing previous visa requirements for the city’s residents, Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu announced on Monday, following a high-level business luncheon in Qatar, on the first leg of his six-day visit to the Middle East. Lee also revealed that Hong Kong and Qatar signed 35 memorandums of understanding and agreements covering a range of crucial fields, including trade, investment, technology, legal cooperation, and financial markets, which he described as laying “a solid foundation for long-term collaboration”.Huawei and Ubtech Robotics inked a deal in Shenzhen yesterday to ally in embodied intelligence and humanoid robotics in industrial, home, and other scenarios. The pair also plan to jointly establish an embodied intelligence innovation center.Shenzhen will hold two AI-related expos from May 22 to 24, the Global AI Device Expo 2025 and 6th Shenzhen Global AI Expo, showcasing nine types of AI end devices, including smartphones, personal computers, tablets, and wearable devices, marking the first such exhibition in the country. Covering 25,000 square meters, the expos are expected to attract more than 300 industry players from 15 countries and regions worldwide.

Industry and company news

Meituan will launch its food delivery service Keeta in Brazil in the coming months and invest USD1 billion over the next five years to support the project’s development, according to a signing ceremony witnessed by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Meituan’s founder and CEO Wang Xing yesterday. The Brazilian president is in China on a state visit to attend a China-Latin American meeting of regional leaders. He called the Beijing forum "another major step in our friendly and strategically close relationship with China, Brazil's largest trading partner since 2009."Chinese bubble tea chain Mixue yesterday signed an MoU with the Brazilian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency to deepen economic and trade cooperation, including the procurement of agricultural products, such as coffee beans, worth over 4 billion yuan over the next three to five years. Mixue will open its first store in Brazil and begin construction of supply chain plants later this year, expecting to provide 25,000 jobs in the country.Alibaba and Baidu, along with the Magnificent Seven Stocks, were included in Wedbush's Defining AI's Future 30 list of the world's top tech firms from hyperscalers, cybersecurity, software, semiconductors, internet, and autonomous/robotics.US sandwich chain Subway will expand its brick-and-mortar stores in China to about 1,000 from 800 by August, media reports. Subway plans to add 500-1,000 outlets in the Chinese market per year and reach 10,000 shops.Chinese respondents showed much higher trust in and acceptance of artificial intelligence than the world at large in a survey of 48,000 people in 47 countries conducted by the University of Melbourne and consultancy firm KPMG. Globally, 58 percent of respondents said they use AI tools, with 93 percent of Chinese reporting workplace use.

Asia-Pacific highlights

Chery Holding Group, the owner of Chinese automaker Chery Automobile, announced that its Kaiyang Laboratory signed a deal with Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University to establish the first overseas collaborative innovation center under Chery Auto’s global open-source program.