As China readies itself for the upcoming Chinese New Year, global merchants have noticed the benefits.

Statistics indicated that on Jan. 6, the first day of a Chinese New Year-themed shopping festival held by Tmall, Australian wine producer Penfolds sold 300,000 bottles of wine, up by 1,400 percent. This amount of wine could fill glasses for 2.8 million people during the Spring Festival.

Pitayas are ready to be shipped to China in an orchard in Vietnam. (File photo)

Famous brands such as Gucci, Adidas and Pandora have launched special editions products to celebrate the Year of the Rat. Lego also issued Spring Festival sets featuring the traditional Chinese lion dance and temple fair.

On Jan. 6 alone, a total of nearly 3,000 high-end facial massagers made by Japanese brand Yaman were sold on Tmall, and products of this kind saw a sales growth of 120 percent from last year.

"The continuous expanding middle-income group, as well as the marginal prosperity of the low- and middle-income group, have placed China in a critical moment of consumption upgrading," said Sheng Laiyun, deputy head of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

"Especially when China's per capita GDP hits $10,000, the number of middle-income earners will keep increasing, further accelerating the trend of consumption upgrading," he added.

In Xi'an, northwest China's Shaanxi province, a Spring Festival shopping fair has kicked off, in which over 5,000 products in 13 categories from some 40 countries and regions in Europe and Central Asia are on display. German milk, Kazakh flour, Russian chocolate and French wine were all exported to the city through China-Europe freight trains.

Statistics from the Ministry of Commerce indicated that in the first 11 months of 2019, the trade volume between China and other Belt and Road countries hit $1.2 trillion, up 4.8 percent year-on-year. A total of 7,469 China-Europe freight trains were launched, increasing 33 percent from the previous year, reaching 55 cities in 18 countries.

On Jan. 1, China implemented new provisional import tax rates that are lower than the most-favored-nation (MFN) tariff rates for over 850 commodities.

The tariff on imported frozen pork dropped from 12 percent to 8 percent, and tariffs on frozen flounder, cod and menhaden also decreased from 7 percent to 2 percent.

According to Vietnamese media, pitaya exports accounted for 32 percent of Vietnam's total export of vegetables and fruits, and 80 percent of the exported volume went to China.