OREANDA-NEWS. April 05, 2013. Sviaz-Bank and the International Analytics Unlimited Bank Club held their Fourth Annual Conference on the subject “Russia-China: Basic Trends in Financial Relations” that was attended by over 100 participants.

The Russian side was represented by executives and employees of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Moscow Stock Exchange, banks, companies involved in international business, rating agencies, and insurance companies. Representatives of China’s Embassy and Chinese banks in Russia were invited as experts.

Andrei Ostrovsky, Deputy Director of the RAS Institute for Far Eastern Studies, spoke about China’s development prospects in the light of the decisions passed at the 18th CPC Congress in November 2012. China, he said, is confronted with the need to abandon the economic growth model that had been sustained by the huge pool of cheap labor and that has been gradually fading into the past as a consequence of the “one family, one child” program pursued by the government since the 1970s.

According to Andrei Ostrovsky, developing a “minor welfare society” was the principal goal set at the 18th CPC Congress. During the years of reform between 1978 and 2010, China had advanced to become a real economic success story – over the past ten years, China has been the world’s leader in GDP growth rate of over 10% a year (by 2020, its GDP per capita must rise to 60,000 yuan or USD9,300); it is third in manufacturing output, and second in electronic information output, and it turns out over 50% of the world’s total industrial products.

Sun Danqing, council on trade and economics of China’s Embassy in Russia, gave more details about the situation in China’s economy. He said that China contributes to growth in the world economy, being the world’s first in import and second in export. In 2012, trade between Russia and China reached USD 88.2 billion, 11.3% more than it was in 2011. The two countries’ goal is to raise it to USD 100 billion by 2015 and to USD 200 billion in 2020. China has been first among Russia’s foreign trade partners for three years in a row, while Russia is ninth in China’s foreign trade (trade between Russia and China has been rising from year to year, but it is still significantly smaller than China’s trade with Europe and the U.S.).

Kirill Zverzhansky, head of Sviaz-Bank’s Treasury Service, said that a longer yuan-ruble trading session on the Moscow Stock Exchange is a key factor for expanding commercial and economic relations between Russia and China. Sviaz-Bank, in its turn, is helping the ruble to win the standing of a regional currency in Russian areas neighboring China and other countries, and it started deliveries of cash rubles from China to Russia in late 2012, the first bank to do so on the Russian market.