Netherlands is strategically located on the European continent. It borders Germany to the east, Belgium to the south and is in close proximity to the United Kingdom via the North Sea and the English Channel.

Asia remains to be a lucrative market for global retail brands and even with the global economic slowdown, there is still a significant volume of growth forecasted through 2016.

After achieving double-digit growth for more than three decades, the Chinese economy has endured a growth decline for six consecutive years since 2010.

Since China achieved the middle-high income status at less than 8,000 dollars of per capita GDP per year, the country has faced many tough challenges – rising costs of production factors, excess production capacity of traditional industries, severe environmental pollution, lack of sufficient social services for the rapidly expanding urban population and population aging.

Facing all the external and internal challenges, China still aims to maintain a relatively high level of economic growth to meet the mid- and long-term development goals, to create enough employment to improve people’s livelihood, and to make sure that future development will not harm the natural environment any further. The so-called green, inclusive and innovative development is the comprehensive goal that the government wishes to achieve.

China is a large country with its own weaknesses and strengths compared to other countries. As a large country, any significant social and economic progress is no easy task, but at the same time, if it is managed well, China has far more potential and flexibility for economic growth than many other countries. This is because China has a large internal market, a large gap between the rich and the poor regions as well as between the urban and the rural sectors. By making the internal market function more efficiently and by reducing the regional and sectoral inequalities, China can take advantage of its scope and scale economies to achieve a relatively high level of economic growth despite these external and internal constraints.

China aims to create more value in agriculture, to improve the income generating capability of the peasantry, to improve people’s dietary quality, and to preserve the natural environment more effectively.

The Chinese government also emphasizes the role to be played by the Belt and Road Initiative which is fundamentally different from the mechanism for promoting international trade set out in the WTO framework. The initiative is to establish a stable and long-term relationship with all concerned countries not only for trade, but also for investment and personal exchanges. The principle is to create a new mechanism of comprehensive international cooperation for the mutual benefit of all the countries, which in turn, are to share mutual responsibility for the long-term prosperity of the world economy.