Currently, the service industry plays a more and more important role in economic development, and it is a common trend for world economic development to intensify service industry. Making a review of the history of economic development in various countries, we can see the regular law of industry structure change is that: the share of agriculture in economy decreases continuously, industry share increase rapidly during the industrialization phase, the service industry output ratio is comparatively stable with smooth increase, and stabilizes at a higher level. Meanwhile, labor force flows from agriculture industry to manufacture and service industries, and service industry occupies the largest share of economy.


With the rapid development of national economy and the upgrade of industry structure in recent years, China made great improvements in service industry. The total production value in 2005 was increased from 88.16 billion USD in 1978 to 7.29677 trillion USD, with 85 times growth in 15 years. And the proportion of service industry in GDP was increased from 24.2% in early opening up period to 40% now.

Meanwhile, the labor force in service industry and its ratio in total employers maintained a stable growth. In 2005, there are 238 million labor forces working in service industry, accounting for 31.4% of total employers.

In the field of opening up to the outside of the world, since china had join WTO, China opened service industry much wider in an active and order way; our government enacted new laws and regulations on admittance of foreign capital to markets in important service trade areas. Chinese service industry made great improvements in perfecting law system of absorbing foreign investments, improving policy transparency, widening opening up areas, and enlarging the scale of direct foreign investments. In 2005, in Chinese service industry (exclude bank, security and insurance industries), there were total up 7445 new foreign invested enterprises, 39.031 billion USD contracted foreign investments, 11.679 billion USD real utilized foreign investment, with respective growth of  8.65%、45.95%、-4.49％.The growth extent of new foreign invested enterprises, contracted foreign investments was higher than national level, and the share of those two in total newly added foreign investment was respectively 16.92% and 20.64%, with respectively 1.23% and 3.22% growth. The bank, security and insurance industries newly permitted 18 Sino-foreign equity joint bank, security and fund management enterprises. And the real utilized foreign investment was 270.10% year-on-year increase to 12.081 billion USD.

At present, according the promises, China carries out WTO obligations in various service departments, such as commercial service, communication service, construction service, distribution and sales service, finance service, tourism service, transportation service, and so on. And the insurance service and tourism service even carry out the WTO promises ahead in terms of the real situations.

In addition, the service trade of China developed rapidly recently. In 2005, imports and exports total amount reached 158.2 billion USD, with 17.5% growth; including 74.4 billion USD imports with 19.2% growth and 83.8 billion USD exports with 16.2% growth. The main service trade incomes and expenses were in tourism, transportations and other commercial services. Those three industry respectively accounted for 32%、28% and 17% , occupying total up 77% of the whole service trade incomes and expenses. And shares of finance, communications, computer and information services was small, each occupied 5% of the whole service trade incomes and expenses. Chinese service trade furthered development, and the imports and exports total amount was up to 86.3 billion USD with 18.2% year-on-year growth in the first half year in 2006.