State Councilor on China's Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation ����Chinese State Councilor Wu Yi told the nation's trade officials on Friday that they should make greater efforts to boost China's foreign trade and economic cooperation. ����Wu, also an alternate member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), said in a speech at the national conference on foreign trade and economic cooperation that they should raise their spirits and progress through the difficulties ahead. ����"We should fully implement the decisions made at the Central Economic Conference and properly handle the relationship between enlarging domestic demand and expanding foreign trade and economic cooperation," she said. "We should always consider domestic demand and foreign trade and economic cooperation together, and fully utilize international and domestic markets and resources to serve China's modernization drive." ����She urged the officials to take the overall national economic situation into consideration and make the utmost efforts to expand exports by every possible means, and to make active and effective use of overseas investment. ����China's foreign trade and economic cooperation encountered unprecedented difficulties last year, she pointed out, as the Asian financial crisis unexpectedly deepened and the nation was hit hard by severe flooding last summer. ����China's exports grew by 0.5 percent last year despite these difficulties, and the volume of arrived overseas investment reached 45.58 billion U.S. dollars, up 0.67 percent. ����"The achievements were indeed hard to come by," she noted. "It is particularly remarkable against the background of neighboring nations which have experienced economic recessions, currency devaluation and shrinking export. The CPC Central Committee and the State Council are satisfied with these achievements." ����The state councilor said that officials should make a clear evaluation of the situation and grasp opportunities to cultivate new growth areas in foreign trade and economic cooperation, and fulfill the tasks of those sectors this year. ����China will grant import and export permission to more industrial companies, promote overseas processing businesses with China-made equipment and raw materials, establish more pilot joint-trade companies, and explore more avenues for export this year. ����Wu pledged that China will further improve its investment environment, open more fields to overseas investors, and offer preferential policies to multinationals so that overseas investment in China will be used in an "active and effective" manner. ����More than 300 officials and leaders of key foreign-trade companies attended the national conference, which opened on Tuesday. Economicnews 1999-01-30 Page2 Full Story in Chinese