China aims to gain 5 percent in its trade with emerging markets by 2015 and is targeting 30 countries as a priority to diversify its foreign trade markets, a senior economic official said yesterday, amid a bearish outlook for trade with developed economies.
The move is part of efforts to speed up the country's foreign trade restructuring to improve efficiency and balance trade, analysts said.
"The selected markets include India, South Africa and a few Arab countries. The rest of the targets are scattered over Asia, Europe, Africa and America," said Zhong Shan, vice commerce minister, without further revealing the future destinations for China to expand its foreign trade.
"It's crucial for China to improve trade with these countries with relatively rich resources, big populations and strategic significance, not only to offset a slowdown in exports caused by the deepening EU debt crisis and the troubled US economy, but also to help turn China into a trade superpower in the long run," Zhong noted.
China's steps to seize new trade opportunities in the emerging markets will relieve its pressure for being excessively dependent on traditional trading partners, Yuan Gangming, director of the macroeconomic research department at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.
"The countries undergoing industrialization are complimentary in trade with China and will have huge demand for Chinese exports. For instance, China is trying to sell products to Middle East countries while its appetite for the region's oil is growing," he said.
However, many large emerging economies still have major concerns about the quality of "Made in China" products, Lin Guijun, a professor at University of International Business and Economics, told the Global Times.
Though China is a big buyer of Iranian petroleum, "the Iranian companies prefer to import infrastructure machinery and heavy equipment produced by traditional Western manufacturers rather than Chinese producers," an official with a State-owned Chinese construction company in Iran who declined to be named told the Global Times yesterday.
"The Chinese government should provide more financial and policy support to Chinese companies that suffer setbacks and cultural conflicts in emerging markets from time to time," Liu Han, a Sudan-based product manager of Huawei Technologies Co, told the Global Times.
China will increase subsidies by 20 percent for small- and medium-sized enterprises that plan to develop in the target countries, according to Zhong, the vice commerce minister.
Emerging markets have played a more dynamic role compared to traditional partners in trade with China.
The nation's exports to the US, EU and Japan declined in January. But its trade with Russia rose by 25.8 percent year-on-year to $7.16 billion last month, and that with Brazil grew 5.7 percent to $6.24 billion, according to data released by China's General Administration of Customs.