The China International Import Expo (CIIE), scheduled to be held in Shanghai from November 5 to 10, demonstrates China’s confidence and determination to expand its openness to the world.

“Hosting CIIE shows that China is not aiming to pursue a trade surplus,” said Zhang Xiaojing, deputy director of the National Institution for Finance and Development and a research fellow at CASS. The Chinese economy is witnessing a significant change from relying too much on investment and export to relying more on consumption and domestic demand. In the future, China will need not only a large number of exports, but also imports.

China’s middle-income group has surpassed 400 million, ranking first globally, and is still growing rapidly. Hosting CIIE serves to open the world’s largest market to the world, which is an important contribution to world economic growth, Zhang concluded.

China’s foreign trade has basically completed a major shift from “encouraging export and limiting import” to free trade, said Sheng Bin, dean of the School of Economics at Nankai University. China’s expansion of imports not only indicates an increasing economic strength, but also reflects China’s responsibility as a major country to share the dividends of its domestic market with the world.

Hosting such a large-scale import expo fully reflects China’s determination and positioning to build a new open economic system and defend the open world economic system, Sheng said. “From a higher point of view, it has also created a new platform for a community of shared future to provide international public goods.”

Zhao Beiwen, deputy director of the Institute of World Economy at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, said that CIIE is an important demonstration of the speed of China’s customs clearance and the facilitation of trade and investment in China. The exhibition is also conducive to promoting import and export trade on a global scale, especially among emerging economies and developing countries, and to facilitating the “B&R” initiative.

During the expo, the high-level Hongqiao International Trade Forum will be held, which will convene leaders of many countries and international organizations, as well as international entrepreneurs. As the host, China will further elaborate on its “two-way opening-up” to the world and advocate the building of a mechanism for consultation, contribution and shared benefits regarding international cooperation, Zhao said.

Expanding imports is not an expedient. It is an important measure to promote the balanced development of foreign trade, and it is also an inevitable requirement for industrial upgrade and meeting consumers’ demand for high-quality life.

“The most important source of China’s national economic competitive advantage has been increasingly transformed from having a cheap labor force to having a huge domestic market demand,” said Cui Fan, a professor from the School of International Trade and Economics at the University of International Business and Economics.

Highly valuing imports does not mean neglecting exports. Imports with reasonable structure and moderate scale will improve export competitiveness. In the current economic environment of the global value chain, restrictions on the import of certain products may have a protective effect on domestic production in the short term, but it is not conducive to the improvement of downstream production competitiveness. Imports with no or low distortion are conducive to improving the overall industrial competitiveness of a country, Cui said.

Actively expanding imports is conducive to better integration of Chinese enterprises into global value chains and international production networks, Sheng said. Chinese companies can not only import advanced equipment, key components and other important intermediate products, but also purchase high-end productive trade services. This will effectively resolve domestic supply bottlenecks and increase the productivity of Chinese enterprises.

In addition, the initiative to expand imports is also good news for Chinese consumers, Sheng said. The annual average overseas spending by Chinese tourists is as high as about 200 billion US dollars. Actively expanding imports will help Chinese consumers fully enjoy the fruits of economic growth and have more access to diverse products of lower prices and higher quality, Sheng concluded.

(Edited and translated by Jiang Hong)