THE upcoming 130th session of the China Import and Export Fair, featuring both online and offline activities, will advance the common growth of industry, supply and innovation chains as well as bring about effective interaction between the international and domestic markets, said its organizers and experts.

The event, also known as the Canton Fair, will be held from tomorrow to Tuesday in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province. The biannual fair was held only virtually twice in 2020 and once earlier this year due to the pandemic.

The event aims to draw more global buyers from online platforms to assist export-oriented companies in gaining new orders, said Chu Shijia, deputy head and secretary-general of the fair’s organizing committee.

“Going online doesn’t mean a simple format changing for the Canton Fair, but a new structural design and process reengineering via the injection of digital technologies,” said Chu, who is also the director-general of the Guangzhou-based China Foreign Trade Center.

Since COVID-19 has caused a severe impact on global supply chains and traditional economic and trade activities, the new economic form of “digital trade” represented by cross-border e-commerce has quickly become a new way to boost trade growth, he said.

China’s cross-border e-commerce imports and exports reached 1.69 trillion yuan (US$260.9 billion) in 2020, up 31.1 percent year-on-year. Over the past five years, the country’s cross-border e-commerce volume has grown by nearly 10 times, data from the Ministry of Commerce showed.

Measures to resume offline exhibitions will stimulate the enthusiasm of domestic consumers and encourage Chinese manufacturers to further solidify growth points in the home market, said Ren Hongbin, vice-minister of commerce.

Apart from providing 60,000 online exhibition booths for 26,000 domestic and international exhibitors, the fair will have an offline exhibition area that covers 16 categories of products, from consumer goods to manufacturing machinery, said the Ministry of Commerce.

The China Import and Export Fair started in 1957. It is the country’s largest and longest-running comprehensive trade fair, and has the largest number of overseas buyers and product categories, said the Ministry of Commerce.

(China Daily)