China plays important role in global economy: US envoy

LOS ANGELES - "China plays an exceptionally important role regionally, but also globally," said Graig Allen, US Ambassador to Brunei Thursday in Orange County.

Allen made the remarks at the start of a two-day business forum held by the US Department of Commerce with the theme "Discover Global Markets: Pacific Rim Consumers".

Having served as deputy assistant secretary for China and deputy assistant secretary for Asia at the US Department of Commerce, Allen said: "It used to be said in the old days that the United States cough, the world will catch flu. And nowadays, if China is not feeling well, the world doesn't feel well, too."

"We need a strong Chinese economy. China is too large, failure or rough slowdown of Chinese economy would be a catastrophe with the world economic growth. We are wise to hope for Chinese economic growth, and we are wise to hope for continued reform in China," he added.

China, together with other Asian countries contribute a large percentage to the world economic growth.

Holly Vineyard, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Global Markets of the US Department of Commerce, said: "Asia represents more than half of global output, and over 40 percent of world trade. The World Bank, which said recently that East Asia will account for about two-fifths of global economic growth. It is the engine of global economic and trade right now."

China's business activities impact heavily the global market. People are impressed with e-commerce transactions on China's Single's Day which falls on Nov 11.

"Single's Day is the largest e-commerce holiday in the world, if you are familiar with Black Friday, it's three times in size in single 24 hours period with almost 10 billion dollars goods sold in China," said Melissa O'Malley, director of Global Merchant and Cross Border Tarde Initiatives for PayPal.

In 2013, the Single's Day sale was $5.6 billion in 24 hours. And the number grew to almost $10 billion a year later. About 300 million consumers joined the online shopping spree in China.

"It becomes an absolute phenomena in last 18 months. It happened from almost nobody talk about it, never saw it in media to something that people talked about all the time at every e-commerce conference," noted O'Malley.

China's GDP growth has slowed down in recent years, but it helps to make China to be a more energetic global economic participant.

"Economists talked a lot about the quality of growth as opposed to the quantity of growth. It's better for the global economy that China is growing at 7 percent from a 13-trillion-dollar economy. It is much healthier than 10 years ago when China was a 7 trillion economy growing 14 percent," Allen said.