New horizon for China-Germany ties

Can we aim for even closer cooperation?

The answer is yes. While China-Germany cooperation has reached a record level, we can do even better. Our two-way trade, which stands at over $160 billion, is only about 4 percent of China's total foreign trade of $3.8 trillion. And Germany's share of China's ever-growing outbound investment is still quite low. This means that there is great potential to be tapped in growing win-win business ties between our two countries.

What's more, China itself has vast space for development. We will work hard to double the size of the 2010 GDP and per capita income by 2020. China, a country with over 1.3 billion people, is simultaneously pursuing industrialization, application of information technologies, urbanization and agricultural modernization. Every year, over 10 million rural people move to cities. The mix of individual consumption is being upgraded, and economic structural adjustment is accelerating. All these will release huge potential in domestic demand.

In particular, reform in China will yield huge dividend. China has relied on reform to achieve sustained and fast growth in the past three decades or so, and it will continue to rely on reform for sustained and sound growth going forward. Reform in China has now entered a deep-water zone where tough challenges need to be tackled. We will fully deepen reform in key areas such as administrative system, fiscal policy and taxation, finance and pricing in order to shift the growth model, improve people's lives, promote social equity and unleash market potential and the driving force for development.

Opening up is also a kind of reform. To advance reform and development through opening up is an important experience we have gained. China follows a win-win strategy of opening up. We are vigorously promoting a new round of opening up to increase openness in both breadth and depth. We will make our trade in services still more open to drive the growth of the service sector. In the coming five years, China will import about $10 trillion of goods and invest $500 billion overseas. Sustained economic growth and further reform and opening up will bring about an ever-growing market in China. This will give Germany greater access to the Asian market and provide more opportunities for growth of German businesses and economic prosperity of Germany.