China's domestic spending power will still need to rely in part on its ability to export and maintain its role as the "world's factory" as well as moving up the value chain to higher end production and innovation to move from "Made in China to Invented in China". All this will benefit from globalization and keeping open, restriction-free multilateral trade. The opening day of the CIIE certainly reinforced this well beyond the clear message from Xi. Much support came from speeches by the leaders of the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. Apart from the benefits of low cost imports to a country's standard of living, a significant proportion of imports are subsequently used to create the exports.

In conclusion, the CIIE was both a clear statement of China's commitment to globalization and a practical impetus to further reform, opening-up and achieving trade deals. It will be interesting to see how reforms have progressed by the time the 2019 CIIE comes around. I suspect Shanghai, a leading global city, will remain at the forefront in these developments.

Colin Speakman is at economist and director of programs in Shanghai for CAPA The Global Education Network, a US-based International Education Organization that cooperates with East China Normal University in Shanghai.

The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not represent the views of China Daily and China Daily website.