China's foreign trade climbed by 27.1 percent year-on-year to 18.07 trillion yuan ($2.8 trillion) during the first half of 2021, driven by robust demand due to the rapid recovery in major economies and the fast growth of cross-border e-commerce, statistics from the General Administration of Customs showed on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the nation's exports surged 28.1 percent year-on-year to 9.85 trillion yuan, and its imports grew by 25.9 percent to 8.22 trillion yuan. Compared with the same period of 2019, the nation's total foreign trade expanded by 22.8 percent.

Between January and June, on a year-on-year basis, the nation's trade with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations rose 27.8 percent, while trade with the European Union increased by 26.7 percent, and with the United States it rose by 34.6 percent.

Given the challenging and complex global economic situation, the trade figures further highlighted China's resilience as the world's largest trading country with a complete industrial chain, said Liang Ming, a researcher at the Beijing-based Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation.

About 40 percent of China's export-oriented businesses recently surveyed by the Ministry of Commerce reported year-on-year growth in new export orders, highlighting improvements in global demand and domestic players' growing earning strength, said Ren Hongbin, assistant minister of commerce.

Ren said that China will further shorten the negative list covering foreign investment, promote more pilot zones for opening-up in the services sector and steadily boost the development of the Hainan Free Trade Port to stabilize foreign trade and foreign investment.