SEOUL, Aug. 21 -- South Korea and China have upgraded the bilateral partnership since the two nations set up diplomatic relations in 1992, especially on areas of trade, finance and culture, a South Korean think tank said Thursday.

After Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Seoul in July, the neighbors strengthened their strategic cooperative partnership, upgrading the quality of bilateral economic cooperation and widening communication channels both politically and diplomatically, the Hyundai Research Institute (HRI) said in a report.

The report said Xi's visit to South Korea drove Seoul and Beijing to enter a new era of "politically warmer and economically hotter," noting that it would be meaningful as this year marks the 22nd anniversary of establishing diplomatic ties on Aug. 24, 1992.

Since that day, trade between South Korea and China surged some 36-fold from 6.4 billion U.S. dollars in 1992 to 228.9 billion dollars in 2013, equaling to an annual average increase of 19 percent.

China has become South Korea's largest trade partner since 2004, and in 2013, South Korea was China's fourth-largest partner for trade.

The bilateral trade has been qualitatively upgraded as main trade items changed from low value-added products such as textiles and cement to high-end goods, including semiconductors, synthetic resins and oil products.

Financial and monetary cooperation has been strengthened. Central banks of the two countries signed a currency swap deal worth 180 billion yuan (about 29 billion U.S. dollars) in December 2008, before expanding the contract to 360 billion yuan in October 2011. Also, the countries agreed to open a market to trade their currencies directly in Seoul as early as within this year.

Cultural exchanges continued to widen. Personnel exchange between the two countries expanded more than 87-fold since the diplomatic normalization, from 90,000 in 1992 to 7.89 million in 2013. A total of 3.97 million South Koreans visited China last year, and 433 million Chinese toured South Korea.

South Korea's exports of cultural contents, including K-Pop or soap opera, to China rose from 581 million dollars in 2009 to 1.29 billion dollars in 2012, equivalent to an annual average expansion of 28.4 percent. The portion of content exports to China accounted for 27.6 percent of the total in 2012, up from 24.5 percent in 2010.