BEIJING — China’s service trade has seen continuous expansion with a better structure, said an official at a trade forum.

Ma Jiantang, secretary of the leading members’ group of the Communist Party of China at the Development Research Center of the State Council, made the remarks at the 2019 China International Fair for Trade in Services that concluded in Beijing on June 1.

In 2018, the import and export volume of knowledge-intensive trade in services saw an increase of 20.7 percent year-on-year, much higher than the overall service trade growth, Ma said.

The share of knowledge-intensive trade in the country’s total service trade went up 2.5 percentage points from the previous year, while the proportion of traditional service trade including tourism, transportation and construction fell 2.2 percentage points.

Ma believed that the future development of China’s service trade will and must depend on the opening-up of the industry.

China will provide institutional guarantees to the service industry and give full play to the role of the market, while attaching greater importance to the application of innovations and the protection of intellectual property, he added.

Last year, China’s foreign trade in services exceeded 5 trillion yuan (about $724.72 billion), up 11.5 percent.