China's service trade totaled 2.6 trillion yuan during the first half of the year, up 2.6 percent year-on-year, maintaining continued and stable growth, according to the Ministry of Commerce.

Service exports grew by 9 percent year-on-year to 933.4 billion yuan, while imports fell 0.6 percent to 1.7 trillion yuan in the first half. The service trade deficit dropped 10.5 percent to 745.7 billion yuan.

In the first half of the year, service trade accounted for 15.1 percent of total foreign trade, 0.5 percentage points higher than last year.

In the first six months, the added value of the service industry increased by 7 percent to 24.8 trillion yuan, injecting impetus to the continued and stable growth of service trade.

During the period, the imports and exports of knowledge-intensive services grew by 9.4 percent to 892.4 billion yuan, accounting for 34.2 percent of the total import and export of services.

Such excellent performance was primarily attributed to China's efforts in creating a sound environment for the development of service trade and improving service trade facilitation, said Gao Lingyun, a researcher at the Institute of World Economy and Politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Science.

The country should further relax restrictions on market access, develop new models of service trade and attach importance to the protection of intellectual property rights, to make China's service industry more competitive internationally, Gao added.