Gu Shengzu, vice-chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), called for efforts to advance high-quality growth of trade during his recent inspection tour in the Yangtze River Delta region.

In his visits to East China's Shanghai, Suzhou and Jiaxing, Gu, also executive vice-chairman of the Central Committee of the China National Democratic Construction Association, suggested enhancing industrial strength to develop foreign trade, reinforcing and expanding industrial supply chains to ensure their smooth connection and safety and to integrate their development, and realizing integration of industrial structure upgrading and optimization of trade.

He urged strengthening foreign trade players and boosting their global resource allocation capability, cultivating a group of world-class foreign trade companies, and rolling out more efficient and practical measures to speed up the cultivation of Chinese multinationals and export service providers.

Gu also proposed keeping unimpeded international trade channels, promoting market diversification, empowering international market expansion with digital and smart technologies, exploring a new trade mode featuring the synchronization and organic integration of online and offline channels, developing cross-border e-commerce, enhancing international logistics capacity, and helping domestic trade logistics articulate with international standards.

Continuous efforts should be made to optimize the business environment, guarantee the high-quality growth of foreign trade through institutional reforms, offer greater convenience for customs clearance at ports, improve trade infrastructure, speed up the construction of free trade zones and ports, give better play to the role of major exhibitions such as the China International Import Expo and China International Fair for Trade in Services, participate in setting rules in emerging fields, and strengthen targeted dynamic research on new trade issues such as tariff barriers and global carbon trade, Gu added.