Zhejiang accelerates pace of building model of high-standard opening up

East China's Zhejiang Province is accelerating the pace at which it builds itself into a model of high-standard opening up.

The province's export structure has been constantly optimized, with electromechanical products and high-tech products accounting for 44.7 percent and 10.1 percent of its total exports in 2022, respectively, according to an official with the provincial commerce department.

This photo taken on Jan. 31, 2023 shows a container terminal of Ningbo Zhoushan Port in east China's Zhejiang Province.(Xinhua/Huang Zongzhi)

The official added that the structure of foreign capital in the province has also been improved. By the end of 2022, 77,000 foreign-invested companies had been approved in Zhejiang, and the actual use of foreign capital in the high-tech industry made up 48.2 percent of the total. In addition, the province's outward direct investment had gone to 152 countries and regions across the world.

Yiwu city in Zhejiang is known as the "world's capital of small commodities." The city has trade relations with 233 countries and regions and receives over 560,000 visits by foreign buyers every year. It is home to more than 8,000 foreign-invested business entities.

The Yiwu International Trade Market is always crowded with Chinese and foreign merchants. Nowadays, an increasing number of factories in Yiwu are taking part in cross-border livestream commerce through Chinagoods, the official trade service platform of the market, to improve their sales.

The Chinagoods platform is connected to physical shops in the market and 2.1 million small- and medium-sized enterprises in upstream industries. It upgrades mart procurement by digitalizing trade, contract fulfilment, financing and monitoring.

The flourishing service trade and cross-border e-commerce sectors have become new platforms for Zhejiang to promote high-quality development and expand high-level opening up. In the last five years, imports and exports of the province's cross-border e-commerce expanded eightfold, while its exports increased 41.6 times.

Digitalization has made Zhejiang's foreign trade more resilient. In the first two months of this year, the province’s exports through cross-border e-commerce platforms soared 73.2 percent year on year, driving its export growth by 1.6 percentage points.

Data showed that trade between China and Central Asian countries via Yiwu-Xinjiang-Europe freight trains increased by 17 times last year from 2013.

The Ningbo-Zhoushan Port in Zhejiang is the first port in the world to have hit an annual cargo throughput of 1 billion tonnes. It operates nearly 300 shipping routes, including 122 to Belt and Road countries.

Zhejiang's foreign trade in goods went up 13.1 percent to 4.68 trillion yuan ($658.63 billion) in 2022, with both imports and exports hitting new highs.

Last year, Beicang district in Ningbo city, Zhejiang, piloted 13 policies to promote high-level opening up, which benefited 274 enterprises. Over 52,900 cross-border e-commerce settlements with a total volume of nearly $33.85 billion were completed under these policies.