India, China should focus on strengthening trade facilitation to help reduce trade imbalances: Senior Beijing official

India and China should continue to strengthen cooperation in trade facilitation and create favourable conditions for expanding bilateral trade scale to help alleviate trade imbalances, a senior Chinese official said on Thursday.

Speaking at the 'India-China Business Meeting & Signing Ceremony' organised by FICCI, Zhu Xiaohong, Counselor, Embassy of China said, "The two sides should continue to strengthen cooperation on trade facilitation, upgrade bilateral, regional and multilateral trade facilitation, and create favourable conditions for expanding bilateral trade scale and alleviating trade imbalance."

She said that for a long time, the imbalance in trade in goods between the countries has been one of the factors troubling economic cooperation.

"To make it clear, China has never deliberately pursued a trade surplus. China is fully aware that balanced trade is sustainable and beneficial to both sides. Over a long period of time, China has taken a series of measures to reduce the trade imbalance in goods and made positive progress in promoting the import of agriculture products from India to China," she added.

The official suggested that the Indian side should focus on the concept of Compatibility, Competitiveness, Creativity, and Cooperation. "Indian companies should make good use of its advantages in the service industry to create manufacturing plus service innovative products," she added.

She noted that China's trade surplus with India reduced by 1.6 per cent to USD 37.9 billion during the first eight months of 2019 when compared with the same period in 2018.

Speaking on the occasion, Liu Changyu, Deputy Director-General, Foreign Trade Department of Ministry of Commerce, PR.China, said that China is willing to further strengthen cooperation with relevant departments of India to jointly create a better future for economic and trade development.

Changyu said that Chinese enterprises have responded positively to the strategy of 'Make in India' and 'Digital India' and their investment in India has exceeded USD 8 billion.

"In the next 15 years, China will import US$ 30 trillion of goods and US$ 100 billion of services from the world. As the only two major developing countries with a population of more than 1 billion in the world, China and India are focusing on development," he said.

A total of 129 MoUs were signed between the Indian and Chinese companies during the event in sectors like agri-related products, minerals, textiles, etc. to further strengthen the trade relations between the two countries.

Vikramjit Singh Sahney, Executive Committee Member, FICCI & Chairman - Sun International & President-International Chamber of Commerce, Paris-India said that India and China have been the strongest economic partners and that India values the contribution of Chinese companies in its economic growth. "Indian industry is upbeat about its relations with China," added Sahney.

The event came ahead of the informal summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.