From April 10th to 12th, the second round of negotiations on China-ASEAN Free Trade Area 3.0 was held in Bangkok, Thailand. Yu Benlin, director of the International Department of the Ministry of Commerce, led the Chinese delegation to attend the meeting. The competent authorities of the ten ASEAN countries and officials from the ASEAN Secretariat attended the meeting . The two sides have comprehensively launched version 3.0 negotiations in various fields, discussing further opening up and cooperation in the fields of digital economy, green economy, trade in goods, investment, competition and consumer protection, sanitation and plant sanitation, standards, technical regulations and conformity assessment procedures, small and medium-sized enterprises, etc. cooperate.
The China-ASEAN Free Trade Area 3.0 negotiation was announced in November 2022. In February 2023, the first round of negotiations will be held online. This round of negotiations is the first offline negotiation between the two parties. The two sides are committed to improving the level of openness in the economic and trade field, expanding mutually beneficial cooperation in emerging fields, continuously enriching the connotation of the China-ASEAN comprehensive strategic partnership, and promoting common prosperity and development in the region.
In the first quarter of 2023, the trade in goods between my country and ASEAN will continue to grow, and ASEAN will continue to maintain its status as my country's largest trading partner. In the first quarter, the total trade value between my country and ASEAN reached 1.56 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 16.1%, which was 11.3 percentage points higher than the growth rate of my country's total foreign trade value in the same period. China-ASEAN trade accounted for 15.8% of my country's foreign trade, an increase of 1.4% over the same period.