The 15th SCO Trade Ministers’ Meeting was held in Bishkek, the capital city of Kyrghyzstan on October 12. Chinese Vice Minister of Commerce Fang Aiqing led a delegation to attend the meeting.

All sides had in-depth talks on the present situation and outlook of regional economic cooperation. They indicated that to admit new members could bring new opportunities for the development of SCO. The meeting passed the guiding document to lead the SCO regional economic cooperation in the coming five years--Measures List for SCO to Further Promote Project Cooperation in 2017-2021, and decided to hand it over to SCO Premiers’ Meeting for approval. The meeting also passed SCO Trade Facilitation Work Group Constitutions, deciding to study on measures for SCO trade and investment facilitation. The Chinese side proposed to improve trade and investment facilitation level, discuss systematic arrangement, strengthen SCO e-commerce business exchanges, conduct capacity and logistics cooperation and strengthen financing cooperation, which has won positive response from all sides.

Since the SCO Xi’an Trade Ministers’ Meeting’s announcement of launching the negotiations on Measures List in 2017-2021 officially in September 2015, all sides have made rounds of negotiations and selections to confirm 38 cooperation measures and items in 7 fields of trade and investment, finance, customs, agriculture, science and technology and information, environmental protection and infrastructure to guide SCO regional economic cooperation in the coming five years. It’s the new “five-year plan” for SCO comprehensive regional economic cooperation and will become one of the main achievements in trade and economic area at the SCO Premiers’ Meeting in November. At the meeting, all sides expressed to value the measure list, jointly take practical actions to push ahead cooperation measures to come into effects as soon as possible.

Also attending were people in charge of trade and commerce from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as well as deputy secretary of SCO and representatives from SCO entrepreneurs’ committee.