On December 19, the seventh meeting of the China-New Zealand FTZ Joint Commission was held online. The two sides comprehensively took stock of and reviewed the implementation of the China-New Zealand FTA on trade in goods, technical barriers to trade, trade in services, movement of natural persons, investment and e-commerce, positively evaluated the important role played by the FTA in expanding the scale of bilateral trade and investment and promoting the development of bilateral economic and trade relations, and exchanged views on promoting recognition of and cooperation on standards. The two sides also discussed the negotiation on service trade in the form of negative lists, so as to prepare for the official start of the negotiation on the negative list of services trade in the next step.

The China-New Zealand FTA was signed in April 2008 and came into effect in October of the same year. It is the first comprehensive bilateral FTA signed by China covering trade in goods, services and investment, and the first FTA signed by China and developed countries. In January 2021, the two sides signed the Upgrade Protocol to further deepen pragmatic cooperation in various fields, and agreed to conduct service trade negotiations in the form of negative lists within two years after the entry into force of the Upgrade Protocol to further improve the level of openness.