China's service trade grows in Q1-3

China's service trade registered rapid growth in the first three quarters of 2024, with a steep increase in the trade of travel-related services, according to official data released on Tuesday.

The country's service trade totaled nearly 5.52 trillion yuan (around 776 billion U.S. dollars) from January to September, up 14.5 percent year on year, according to the Ministry of Commerce.

Services exports came in at 2.27 trillion yuan in the January-September period, rising 15.3 percent from the same period last year, and services imports went up 14 percent year on year to 3.24 trillion yuan, resulting in a deficit of some 971 billion yuan.

Trade in knowledge-intensive services rose 5.3 percent year on year to 2.13 trillion yuan, the data revealed.

Travel services saw a stellar performance in the first nine months, as imports and exports of travel services totaled 1.5 trillion yuan from January to September, a remarkable increase of 42.8 percent year on year.

A playful giant panda - less than two years old - has been captured on camera climbing a tree and then resting on one of its branches at the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda (CCRCGP) in southwest China's Sichuan Province.

In the video, the panda Xin Qiao climbed up the wooden frame and onto the tree. Then it crawled from the base of the tree to the branches and sat down to rest.

Xin Qiao was born in August 2024 at the Shenshuping base of the Wolong National Nature Reserve to mother Mei Mei.

The CCRCGP has built the world's largest captive population of pandas and pioneered rewilding research through captive breeding and training. It also runs a global cooperation platform that links 18 zoos in 16 countries and regions with 39 domestic breeding institutions and more than 10 research institutes.