Trade between China and Russia is expected to top 20 billion USD this year, a goal originally set to be attained next year. This suggests the advent of a new era for the bilateral trade and economic cooperation.

As a matter of fact, Sino-Russian trade and economic cooperation has been gearing up since 2000 after years of adaptation to each other. The two countries will speed up their bilateral trade in more areas on a perfect operation system.

Statistics of the Chinese Customs shows that, growing at a pace of 20 percent annually on average, trade between the two partners soared to 15.76 billion USD in 2003 from 5.72 billion in 1999. For the first eight months of 2004, imports and exports between the two sides amounted to 12.87 billion USD, up 35.4 percent over the same period of last year. China is the fourth largest trade partner of Russia while Russia is China's eighth largest trade partner.

Russia's bid for WTO membership will serve as a catalyst to the order and way of trade between the two countries and their cooperation on aviation, space technology, biotech, chemicals, machinery, agriculture and forest will upgrade the bilateral trade and economic partnership so as to improve the trade structure. This opinion is held by Li Gang, a researcher of Chinese Ministry of Commerce.

Li's colleague Liu Huaqin stressed that the fast growth of the bilateral trade should not depend too much on general commodities. He thought large projects including cooperation on oil and gas pipelines can boost the development of relevant industries. And rise of mutual investment would give a push-start to the bilateral trade, he argued.

Experts also noticed the fact that although the trade between China and Russia leaped forward by 32.1 percent in 2003, the speed was still slower than the rise of China's overall foreign trade. This shows great potential of further cooperation.

Experts urged to have bank payment settlement system, arbitration mechanism and insurance regime up to international standards in place between the two countries to facilitate the bilateral trade.

Besides that, China and Russia, as members of Shanghai Cooperation Organization, should take the advantage of the multilateral mechanism to work closely together to push their trade forward, experts suggests.

By People's Daily Online