China's service trade rises in first seven months

BEIJING -- China's service trade rose by 7.3 percent year on year to nearly 2.81 trillion yuan ($435.02 billion) in the first seven months of the year, the Ministry of Commerce said Thursday.

Of the total, service exports reached about 1.34 trillion yuan, up by 23.2 percent year on year, and service imports stood at 1.47 trillion yuan, down by 4 percent from a year earlier.

In July alone, the country's service trade reached 431.92 billion yuan, up by 10.1 percent, year on year.

China has taken a slew of measures to widen the opening-up of the service industry and pledged to make more efforts to promote the opening-up of trade in services to a higher level.