A Xinhua report from the 2026 China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS), which closed on September 13 in Beijing, showed technology-intensive services becoming a new driver of China's services trade. In the first seven months of 2026, China's services exports rose 17.1% year on year, with knowledge-intensive services making up more than half.
A solo exporter armed with just two computers attracted crowds at Alibaba's booth: his eight AI agents vet clients, design products and chase orders around the clock, selling over 3,000 baseball caps to buyers in Europe, North America and Africa in two months. More than 10 million SMEs worldwide now run on Accio Work, an agent platform by Alibaba's international arm, with users up over 30-fold in a year.
China's three major telecom operators showcased self-developed AI agents. China Mobile's MobileClaw desktop office agent, in public trial since March with 25 million free tokens, can write code, prepare reports and manage email. China Mobile International displayed a compute-trading platform letting clients access models across borders and settle by token, serving over 15,000 enterprise clients abroad.
Tokens are becoming a tradable commodity: in late August an AI company in Xiamen completed what the city called its first commercial "token export," delivering scripts, translations and voice-overs to an Ethiopian livestream client totaling 2.7 billion tokens. ICBC launched an eight-product compute-finance suite and PICC rolled out insurance for the compute-power industry.
Source: Xinhua / China Economic Net
