There are rumblings from behind the bamboo curtain which could indicate a push from China to export services and promised to share locally developed technology with the world.
In a speech delivered yesterday at an event called the “Global Trade in Services Summit of 2021” China’s President Xi Jinping said China will change rules for its services sector. The move will bring them into line with international norms and make it harder for the US and UK governments to complain about.
“We will create more possibilities for cooperation, by scaling up support for the growth of the services sector in Belt and Road partner countries and by sharing China’s technological achievements with the rest of the world”, Xi said.
China is currently a net importer of services, but is rated the world’s second-finest destination for outsourced labour thanks in part to workers being well-educated.
Xi hopes to tap the country’s outsourcing skills, and sees digital services delivery as an opportunity for China and promising to create “digital trade demonstration zones” to show how it’s done. Details of just what the zones will offer has not been revealed in detail. It will be hard to see how China will get around tough privacy legislation in Europe which requires rules that stop the government’s snooping on foreign data, for example.
He did, however, announce a new stock exchange that would be opened in Beijing, to “support the innovation-driven development of small- and medium-sized enterprises”.
That decision has been interpreted as a policy to let Chinese tech companies find funding at home, at a time when Beijing has made it harder for them to go public offshore thanks to tightened regulations on how and where data describing Chinese citizens can be stored.
