Yes.

The deficit in China's services trade has been swelling in recent years, and the total amount has steadily increased. China's annual service trade deficit, whose proportion of trade surplus in goods has been rising as an indicator, has been more than USD200 billion since 2014, becoming a main cause of the ever-shrinking annual current account surplus.

A key factor underlying this situation is that China hasn't sufficiently opened up its services, and this has produced a lack of international competitiveness in the sector. Apart from the highly tradable information and communications services sector, most Chinese services, including wholesale and retail, transport, hospitality and finance and technology, lag behind the labor productivity rate of developed countries, according to the Yicai Research Institute's Global Unit Labor Cost database. Corresponding reform and opening up measures need to be in place and play their roles to reverse this situation, while countering the trend of China's expanding service trade deficit this year will be hard.