In the early months of this year, the World Trade Organization predicted that the global trade volume for 2020 might register a huge drop of up to 32 percent because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now that the year is approaching its end, it is clear that the global trade volume will have dropped, but not as heavily as anticipated. This is mainly because almost every country has seen imports from China account for a higher percentage of their trade volume.

Foreign trade with China has seen significant growth while that of the rest of the world has declined.

The primary cause for that lies, of course, in China's success in generally controlling the virus and so being able to resume production. It has been predicted that China's total exports might exceed 12 percent of the world's total in 2020, with imports also accounting for a historically high percentage.

Of course, in the long run, China's trade with the outside world still faces pressures. For years, the exports of domestic labor-intensive industries have been declining, which in turn has pressured the country to further optimize the structure of the economy and upgrade its industries.

In order to stabilize China's foreign trade in the long run, it is necessary to render efforts in two aspects, namely the market and industries. For the market, it is urgent to accelerate the forming of the "dual-circulation" pattern that makes the domestic market the mainstay complemented by external markets, and to better encourage the exchange of two markets and their respective resources. The ongoing measures such as lowering tariffs, further openingup and optimizing the business environment are all helping in this regard.

For industries, the key lies in raising the competitiveness of domestic industries, and promoting innovation so as to make domestic industries more globally competitive.

With this in mind, domestic policies have been encouraging R&D and boosting the development of key technologies, so as to further sharpen the total competitiveness of China's foreign trade.

－LIANG MING, HEAD OF THE INSTITUTE OF FOREIGN TRADE, CHINESE ACADEMY OF INTERNATIONAL TRADE AND ECONOMIC COOPERATION