8th China-Eurasia Expo offers global business opportunities, boosts regional trade, cooperation

The eighth China-Eurasia Expo has presented businesspeople from around the world with numerous development opportunities, injecting vitality into regional trade and fostering cooperation.

The large-scale event began Wednesday at the Xinjiang International Convention and Exhibition Center, located in the regional capital of Urumqi at the foot of the Tianshan Mountains.

Themed "New Opportunities of Silk Road, New Vitality for Eurasian Cooperation," the exhibition will run until Sunday. It has drawn over 1,900 participants from 50 countries, regions, and international organizations and showcased over 6,000 varieties of products.

The expo, which covers an area of 140,000 square meters, includes four major exhibition zones: investment cooperation, international exhibition, special industries, and equipment manufacturing.

"There are many high-quality products on display from many countries from the region. We are also very happy to participate from Pakistan. Pakistan and China are good neighbors, good partners, good brothers, so we are very determined to take our cooperation, whether it is trade, whether it is people-to-people cooperation, whether it is academic cooperation, we want to take it to new heights because this is what Pakistan-China friendship means," Pakistan's Ambassador to China Khalil Hashmi said.

The event will also host over 50 trade promotion activities, with more than 200 projects expected to be signed.

For the first time, the expo has set up exhibition halls for China's centrally-administered state-owned enterprises, enterprises using special and sophisticated technologies to produce novel and unique products, enterprises from the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA), and leading enterprises in Xinjiang's eight major industrial clusters, namely, oil and gas, coal, mining, grains and oil, cotton, fruits and vegetables, livestock products and new energy materials.

This year's exhibition has also set up a special pavilion for the China (Xinjiang) Pilot Free Trade Zone (FTZ), aiming to showcase the unique features, progress, and achievements of three areas: Urumqi, Kashgar, and Horgos.

As the first pilot FTZ in China's northwest border areas, Xinjiang FTZ was officially established in November 2023. The FTZ has since embarked on an array of reform initiatives, marking a robust start to its development.

From January to April this year, the total import and export volume of the Xinjiang FTZ reached 38.5 billion yuan (about 5.4 billion U.S. dollars), accounting for 27.92 percent of the total import and export volume of Xinjiang.

"We greatly anticipate that these Chinese technologies, equipment, and solutions will serve countries along the Belt and Road, contributing Chinese wisdom and Chinese strength to the building of a community with a shared future for mankind," said Dai Hegen, chairman of China Railway Construction Corporation.

The five-day event will hold three business matching sessions focusing on agricultural products, food, textiles and garments, energy, and chemical industries. These events will target Russia, Central Asia, West Asia, South Asia, and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) members, facilitating economic and trade investments.

Since 2011, the China-Eurasia Expo has successfully held seven sessions, yielding fruitful results. More than 12,200 domestic and foreign exhibitors from more than 70 countries and regions exhibited during past expos, with a total of 2.16 million visitors.

8th China-Eurasia Expo offers global business opportunities, boosts regional trade, cooperation

Active policy measures to boost the economy, the fostering of new quality productive forces and the optimization of measures for the real estate sector will ensure China sustains a robust GDP growth this year, said Dora Liu, deputy CEO for Deloitte China, a global auditing and consulting firm, at the just-concluded Summer Davos forum.

The three-day Summer Davos forum, or the World Economic Forum (WEF)'s 15th Annual Meeting of the New Champions, concluded in Dalian City, northeast China's Liaoning Province, on Thursday.

In an interview with China Global Television Network on the sidelines of the forum, Liu noted that from January to May, the Chinese economy has shown a vigorous growth momentum in manufacturing, consumption and exports as the World Bank has raised the growth estimate for China's economy in 2024 from 4.5 percent to 4.8 percent.

"In the first five months we have seen very strong performance of three sectors. First and foremost, manufacturing, no doubt. Second is service consumption, and third is external demand - you can interpret as exports. From a production side, manufacturing, particularly advanced manufacturing, or high-tech-related manufacturing has achieved a very impressive result," said Liu.

Official data showed that in the first five months, China's industrial output increased 6 percent year-on-year. In May, the output of the high-tech manufacturing sector surged 9.4 percent, 4.4 percentage points faster than the pace of overall industrial output growth.

The data also showed that China's consumption growth picked up pace in May with retail sales expanding 8.6 percent year-on-year, while fixed-asset investment grew 5.6 percent year-on-year in the first five months.

"That indicates we (China) are on the right track of high-quality growth, particularly, the new [quality] productive forces as the top priority of our economic growth. The combination of our measures, the new [quality] productive forces, and the optimization of real estate measures. All in all, I'm very confident that we can achieve more than 5 percent GDP growth in this year," said Liu.

First introduced in 2023, new quality productive forces refer to advanced productivity freed from the traditional economic growth mode and productivity development paths. It features high-tech, high efficiency and high quality.

On May 28, Deloitte hosted the inaugural MNC Future Summit in Shanghai, gathering together over 200 global delegates, including senior executives from renowned multinational companies (MNCs) in China, top industry professionals, and Deloitte's client service lead partners.

The attendees to the summit all agreed that the Chinese economy is too big and too important to ignore, and that despite the complexities, the Chinese market still hold abundant opportunities for global investors, according to Liu.

"The reason behind why we were all so confident of China's economy is exactly as what Premier Li Qiang mentioned and pointed out [at the opening plenary of the Summer Davos forum]. First and foremost, the mega size of our digital economy, the huge amount of user cases and the innovation - pivotal is the power of the innovation hub. Second is the talent pool, and third is China has been keeping advocating the open-door policy and it put words into action," said Liu.

Deloitte deputy CEO confident in China's economic development