China's Mofcom Launches Five Measures To Stimulate Consumption

Jiang Zengwei, the deputy director of China's Ministry of Commerce, and Fang Aiqing, the assistant director of the Ministry of Commerce, said during an interview that China plans to boost its overall consumption through five measures.

Jiang said that in response to the global financial crisis in 2009, China had launched a series of measures to invigorate circulation and expand consumption. During the year, consumption contributed 52.5% to China's GDP.

For new consumption stimulation measures in 2010, Fang said the ministry will focus on five areas: popular consumption, rural consumption, service consumption, recycling consumption, and credit consumption. Fang believes that these five areas will play positive roles in expanding the overall consumption in the Chinese market.

The five measures are: maintaining favorable policies in automobile and home appliances markets to expand consumption in these popular sectors; building 100,000 rural stores to enlarge rural consumption; increasing the number of housekeeping service workers by 200,000 to improve service consumption; developing second-hand product markets to encourage recycling consumption; and enlarging the scale of credit consumption.