Commonwealth sees huge potential in trade with China

In terms of possible steps with China, the Deputy Secretary-General said the Commonwealth was keen to build a partnership with China to help build productive trade capacities for its small and vulnerable states.

Small states, constituting 31 of the Commonwealth's membership, depend crucially on international trade for their overall economic prospects. With limited resources, these states face many trade challenges, including dependence on a narrow range of exports and limited capacity to harness growth opportunities.

There is widespread acknowledgement today that small states require heterodox solutions to address their specific challenges and vulnerabilities. Therefore, the Commonwealth executive body encouraged these countries to build capacities to export more to emerging and large developing countries markets, like China.

"I believe that China can certainly play an important role in those aspects," Maharaj said, suggesting that China could contribute key capacity-building initiatives to enable small state countries to be evolved in trade.

Referring to the prospective of China's economy, the Deputy Secretary-General said he was confident in the development of the Chinese economy.

"China's economy is absolutely critical to ensure that we continue to have global trade increasing," he stressed.

Having travelled around to Commonwealth countries, Maharaj found that China had already built a very good trade relationship with them.

"We would like to see continued growth and prosperity in China," he said, "If China is doing well, so can the rest of us. This is important to ensure the smallest and most vulnerable countries in the world have an equal share."

The Commonwealth is a voluntary association and is not a trading bloc. It does not possess association-wide policy mechanisms to promote trade.

However, the coming year would be offering a breakthrough for the partnership between the Commonwealth and China, during China's presidency of G20, he said.

"We have a regular development dialogue with the presidency of G20," Maharaj introduced, saying that the dialogues between the G20 and the Commonwealth had included supporting a hundred developing countries.

"We are very keen and excited to work with China during this year of G20 presidency to enable some of the key issues that we know China can advance and play an important global leadership role," Maharaj said.

"Certainly trade is one area, infrastructure is another important area," Maharaj said, noting that infrastructure development was not only in the context of trading corridors, but also in the context of climate change, mitigation, and adaptation.

"I think the partnership could certainly expand from economic issues to environmental issues and development issues, in which China can certainly play a much more important role," Maharaj said.