IMF: China Is Making Proactive Efforts to Uphold Multilateral Trade
Bangkok (ANTARA) – An International Monetary Fund (IMF) official said China was making proactive efforts to uphold a rules-based multilateral trading system. Chinese companies, he added, could play an important role in disseminating new technologies and supporting their adoption through outbound investment.
“The IMF welcomes China’s proactive efforts to uphold a rules-based multilateral trading system,” Thomas Helbling, Deputy Director of the IMF’s Asia and Pacific Department, told Xinhua in an interview on the sidelines of the 2026 IMF and World Bank Group Annual Meetings in Bangkok, Thailand.
“Ultimately, it is important for countries to resolve the underlying tensions and differences behind trade disputes. For a major economy such as China, it is important to take a leadership role in resolving some of these differences,” he said.
Helbling also said he hoped China would help other countries benefit from new technologies through investment. Foreign direct investment by Chinese companies could play an important role in spreading new technologies and supporting their adoption in other countries, including in the digital and green-energy sectors.
Helbling said the IMF remained concerned about the risks posed by growing geoeconomic fragmentation and geopolitical tensions, which could hamper trade, increase trade friction and inefficiencies in the global and regional economies, and weaken growth.
He stressed that the IMF had long advocated resolving the underlying issues behind trade tensions and maintaining a trading system that is ideally multilateral and open.
On economic resilience in China and Asia as a whole, Helbling said the effects of energy shocks had been more muted than expected earlier this year.
“In China’s case, the government has cushioned the impact on end-user prices and mobilised other energy sources to offset some of the negative shock to fossil-fuel supplies,” he said.
He added that the AI boom was spreading and generating broader positive spillover effects across the region, including in China.
In its latest Regional Economic Outlook for Asia and the Pacific, released on Thursday (15 October), the IMF raised its forecast for Asia’s economic growth in 2026 to 4.8 per cent, an increase of 0.4 percentage points from its April projection.
On the Asia-Pacific economic outlook, Helbling said that although inventory buffers and measures such as energy subsidies or tax cuts had limited the impact of energy supply shocks, these measures would be difficult to sustain for long.
If energy shocks persisted or intensified, countries would eventually run out of their inventories, and the full impact of higher prices would affect their economies more severely, he explained.
He recommended that countries rebuild their buffers to ensure they are prepared to respond effectively to further energy supply shocks.