Judging from the current trend, China expects a total trade volume reaching US$1.1 trillion this year, a growth of 30 percent and with an estimated surplus near $10 billion.

The remark was made by Yi Xiaozhun, commerce minister assistant, at a working conference on the promotion of exports by enterprises run by private citizens held recently in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province. He added that it remains an arduous task of maintaining sustainable trade development since there are many uncertainties in the international environment and some deep-rooted problems in trade development have not been fundamentally solved.

Export situation after the textile integration allows no optimism, Yi stressed, and frictions on textile will become a prominent problem facing China's foreign trade next year.

The extensive pattern of export growth is another factor affecting China's healthy trade development, and Chinese enterprises have suffered much due to the lack of independent intellectual property rights, especially those on core technologies.

The lack of independent IPR in some exported products has caused bigger quantity but lower price of exported commodities, experts pointed out. Statistics showed that in the first three quarters this year China's color TV set export increased 36.1 percent in quantity, but decreased 5.1 percent in price. Besides, the country's competitiveness in export will also be weakened by soaring prices of energies and raw materials, as well as tight supply of coal, electricity and oil.