China never purposely pursues a trade surplus and has tried to reach a balance in trade, Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi said here Thursday.

"Realizing balanced import and export is the basic objective of China's trade policies," Wu stressed while addressing a welcome banquet hosted by six American organizations.

In response to the relatively fast-growing trade surplus over the last three years, Wu said, the Chinese government has adopted a series of measures to expand imports, including lowering import tariffs, relaxing market access, promoting import facilitation, creating policy-driven import credit and insurance for import credit, and perfecting the import promotion mechanism.

Meanwhile, she said, China has strictly controlled the export of certain products, imposed extra export tariffs on some items, abolished or reduced export tax rebate rates for a number of products and worked hard to optimize its export structure.

The most influential Canton Fair or Chinese Export Commodities Fair has been changed to China Import and Export Fair, Wu said.

Thanks to its newly added import functions, the fair has become an important platform for foreign goods entering the Chinese market, Wu added.

Due to the above efforts, she noted, China has jumped to be the world's third-largest import market from eighth place in 2000 and in 2006 achieved an import volume of 800 billion U.S. dollars.

Wu also pointed out that sustaining economic development by expanding domestic demand is a basic goal set by China and an important component of China's economic and trade policies.

"China today is characterized by accelerated industrialization and urbanization, the improved living standards of its people and the quickened upgrading of its consumption structure," she said.

China, with a population of 1.3 billion people, represents "a huge realistic and potential domestic market," she stressed.

It is estimated that by 2010, China will be the world's second-largest market after the United States, with a domestic market scale of nearly 5 trillion dollars, about 1.2 trillion dollars worth of goods imports and over 200 billion dollars of services imports, she said.

"We are also making efforts to build a resource-conserving, environment-friendly and innovative country," Wu said.

"All these will provide our global trading partners including the United States with enormous market spaces and rare business opportunities and create favorable conditions for China to strike a basic balance in trade," she said.

The six organizations are U.S.-China Business Council, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, China General Chamber of Commerce-USA, American Bankers Association, American Council of Life Insurers and Financial Services Forum.

Source: Xinhua