A careful review of China's trade policy will more than deepen understanding of the far-reaching significance of China's economic and trade growth to the world.

It will also underscore the urgency for the international community to stand firmly against trade protectionists who try to make trade champions like China the scapegoat for domestic woes.

Four years on, the fragile global recovery is still increasingly threatened by an evolving European debt crisis. This should reinforce the necessity of international efforts to keep trade protectionism at bay in the wake of the 2008 global crisis.

In fact, global efforts to check protectionism have not only helped save the world from a scenario that would be more ugly than it already is, they have also laid a solid foundation for much-needed global rebalancing.

The development of China's economy and trade has maintained a good momentum in 2010 and 2011 to sustain the global recovery. More importantly, the world's second largest economy has meanwhile drastically cut its dependence on external demand as a share of GDP. The country's current-account surplus, which reached about 10 percent of its GDP in 2007, fell to less than 2.8 percent last year.

The fourth trade policy review of China, where members of the World Trade Organization examine the trade policies and practices of China over the past two years, was held on Tuesday and Thursday in Geneva.

The WTO Secretariat report pointed out that, when measured net of the imported components used in China's exports, China's bilateral surpluses with the United States and the European Union are significantly smaller.

In spite of all the cacophony from protectionists about China's trade growth, the above-mentioned fact serves as compelling evidence that, as an indispensable manufacturing link in the global value chain, China has made trade growth a driving force for both its own economic transformation and the global rebalancing.

And if we believe that China's rise since it acceded to the WTO is of help to participants in the global trading system, including China itself, we should only expect more from free and fair trade in the century of globalization.