Long-term focus can offset short-term challenges to export sector

China's exports in the past few years have been resilient, making valuable contributions to the country's economic growth that faced a pile of negative factors, including disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic and continuing geopolitical tensions.

How will China's exports perform this year? Will outbound shipments keep growing or will they decline?

Customs data showed exports increased just under 1 percent year-on-year during the first two months of this year in renminbi terms, which was better than the previous forecasts.

Some experts recently predicted the country's exports will decline during the second quarter and then rebound during the third quarter.

There are also people who are quite pessimistic in their outlook, saying the country's full-year exports will probably decline.

Their arguments seem reasonable. The global economy, they argue, faces an increasing recession threat; and external demand for Chinese products is, therefore, weak, exerting pressure on China's export growth.

That was, in a sense, true until a few days ago. Many ports at home and abroad faced sluggish container throughput with empty containers piling up in the first two months of the year.

Yet, in recent days, container throughput at many Chinese ports has improved much.

From the north to the south, ports in coastal areas of China have seen a decline in the levels of empty container stockpiles, with some ports' container throughput rising on a yearly basis, according to a report by business and financial news provider CLS.

There is no denying, however, that China's exports face relatively huge uncertainties, mostly because the gloomy global economic prospects weigh on both the prices and volumes of Chinese goods exports.

However, the external pressure is short-term, and will end gradually if developed economies stop increasing interest rates and the Russia-Ukraine conflict eases.

Besides, the sluggish external demand not only affects China's exports, but also hurts Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam even harder, as they lack the resilience in foreign trade of the kind that China has, due to their relatively weaker industrial and supply infrastructure.

The high-quality development of China's foreign trade in the long run is what really matters.

In the short term, it is important for China to step up efforts to stabilize export growth while improving foreign trade structure.

To that end, it is crucial for the country to take more action to maintain stable exports to major trading partners such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the European Union, the United States, Japan and South Korea.

At the same time, the country is expected to further tap new market potential in economies participating in the Belt and Road Initiative, as well as economies in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

Such efforts will produce effects conducive to the long-term high-quality development of the country's foreign trade, adding more resilience to the sector.

China needs to implement more supportive measures to promote healthy development of new business formats and novel forms of foreign trade, such as cross-border e-commerce, and trade at specially designated marketplaces.

It also needs to actively optimize the business environment to promote the growth of foreign trade market entities.

After all, firm confidence and stable expectations are what drive enterprises to expand investment and seek growth.

The most important thing is to accelerate the building of a unified national market, and create a more transparent, stable and enabling business environment that is law-based, market-oriented and up to international standards.