The 2026 Yiwu Commerce Conference opened this week, drawing about 1,200 experts, officials and business representatives under the banner of accelerating the city's open trade channels and digital-trade ecosystem, according to the Yiwu government portal.
Former vice-minister Jiang Xiaojuan delivered a keynote on 'AI empowerment, mutual benefit and digital-trade competitiveness,' tracing how AI is reshaping China's trade pattern and lifting the competitiveness of digital trade. Another speaker framed Yiwu merchants' overseas expansion as 'small business, big equality: the hexagonal going-global of Yiwu bosses in the AI era.'
The conference, hosted by the Yiwu Market Development Research Institute, released two research outputs - a Yiwu Digital Trade Development Report and a Yiwu Enterprises' Latin America Going-Global report - and ran parallel sessions on the Yiwu small-commodities-city AI ecosystem, high-quality market development and logistics-hub growth.
Underlying data reinforce the narrative: YiwuPay cross-border transaction volume reached US$7.51 billion in the first nine months, up more than 98% year on year, while the city has deployed 30 AI applications serving over 70,000 users and pushed a brand-going-global program across 103 projects. For the first eight months, Yiwu's imports and exports totaled 636.4 billion yuan, up 14.8%, with exports of 548.85 billion yuan up 12.8%, a record high.
Source: Yiwu government portal / institutional-research disclosures (paraphrased and translated from Chinese official and financial media; reprinted for informational purposes with attribution).
