Recently, the British “Financial Times” published an article focusing on the new developments in China’s foreign trade, pointing out that China is building new advantages in the global trade pattern, and the export of knowledge-intensive services is showing a trend of accelerating growth.
China has been the world’s largest trader in goods for many years. At the same time, significant progress has been made in the field of service exports in recent years. Knowledge-intensive services have become a new phenomenon in the changes in China’s foreign trade.
At present, China’s rapidly growing service exports mainly cover information and communication technology, engineering management, construction services, data analysis and research and development, and financial services and intellectual property-related services are also constantly expanding.
According to data from the World Trade Organization, China has made significant progress in exporting digital delivery services and has jumped from 17th place in the world in 2005 to the sixth largest exporter in the world.
Data for 2024 strongly proves the strong momentum of knowledge-intensive service exports. China’s information and communication technology service exports that year reached US$100 billion, exceeding traditional export commodities such as toys and footwear; exports of “other commercial services” including consulting services, research and development, and technology reached US$113 billion, which was also higher than the export scale of some traditional commodities such as steel and clothing.
The Financial Times believes that this change is closely related to China’s continued cooperation in building the “Belt and Road”.
“Belt and Road” cooperation not only strongly promotes the export of goods such as steel, cement and heavy equipment, but also drives a series of services required for the operation of ports, railways and power stations, such as operations management, digital monitoring, technical training, maintenance agreements, software upgrades and cloud service support.
As the export added value of products such as electric vehicles, robots, drones, solar panels and wind power equipment continues to increase, the export of knowledge-intensive services has also increased.
These products generally have a high degree of digitalization and often require support such as software upgrades, remote monitoring, cloud connections and technical maintenance after export, further promoting the export of knowledge-intensive services.
In the field of artificial intelligence, China’s large open source models represented by DeepSeek are continuously expanding their overseas influence.
With lower costs and easier access to usage thresholds, Chinese large language models have received widespread attention in emerging markets such as Africa and the Middle East.
The increase in the application of related models may further drive demand for services such as predictive maintenance, data analysis and smart infrastructure management, thus forming a strong support for the export of knowledge-intensive services.
In general, China’s foreign trade structure is undergoing new changes.
Different from relying more on commodity exports in the past, the proportion of technology, digital systems and supporting services in foreign trade is gradually increasing.
As China’s leading technology companies continue to be favored, more Chinese companies are accelerating their integration into global knowledge-intensive trade, which is expected to further expand growth space and demonstrate stronger competitiveness on the global trade stage.
