One of the goals of South Korean President Lee Myung-bak's visit to China is to speed up negotiations over a free trade agreement.As Andrew Dupuis finds out, bilateral trade between China and South Korea has seen rapid development over the years, with great potential waiting to be unleashed.

For years, China has been South Korea's largest trading partner and largest export market, with 30% of South Korea's total exports heading to China.

China is South Korea's largest source of trade surplus, which hit 40 billion US dollars in 2010. China is also its largest overseas investment destination.

Meanwhile, South Korea is China's third largest trading partner.

But bilateral trade used to stand at only 5 billion US dollars in 1992, when the two first established diplomatic ties. But that number exceeded 200 billion dollars in 2010, nearly 6 billion higher than the combined trade volume of South Korea and the US, and South Korea and Japan.

The momentum is indeed remarkable, considering it took 26 years for China-US trade to exceed 200 billion dollars.

In the past five years, the annual growth rate of two-way trade has hovered at 25 percent, much faster than the growth of China's trade with the US, EU and Japan.

With rapid economic growth for both sides and concerted efforts towards an early enforcement of a bilateral free trade agreement, China-South Korea trade still enjoys huge potential. The two countries have put forward the goal of bringing bilateral trade volume to 300 billion US dollars by 2015.

Go to Forum >>0 Comment(s)