BEIJING — China's service trade maintained momentum in the first two months of this year, jumping 33.5 percent year-on-year to nearly 953.5 billion yuan (about $146.6 billion), the Ministry of Commerce said on April 6.

Of the total, service exports reached about 467.6 billion yuan, up 39.4 percent year-on-year, and service imports stood at 485.9 billion yuan, increasing 28.3 percent year-on-year.

The growth of service trade exports outpaced import growth by 11.1 percentage points, resulting in a 57.6-percent drop in the service trade deficit.

The service trade deficit stood at 18.3 billion yuan, 24.9 billion yuan less than in 2021, according to the ministry.

Trade in knowledge-intensive services raked in 382.4 billion yuan, up 17.9 percent year-on-year.

Knowledge-intensive service exports gained 20.3 percent to 219.7 billion yuan, while knowledge-intensive service imports rose 15 percent to 162.7 billion yuan.

Travel services recovered during the period, as trade in the sector advanced 16.9 percent from last year to 149.8 billion yuan.

In 2021, China's service trade went up 16.1 percent year-on-year to nearly 5.3 trillion yuan.

China has taken a slew of measures to widen the opening-up of the service industry and pledged to make more efforts to promote the opening-up of trade in services to a higher level.