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The 2026 China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) opened with fanfare on September 9 at Beijing's Shougang Park and will run for five days through September 13. According to official channels including the Beijing municipal government and Xinhua, this year's fair drew more than 1,800 companies exhibiting on-site at Shougang Park, including 456 Fortune Global 500 and industry-leading firms — the largest scale in the fair's history. Delegations and exhibitors from 90 countries, regions and international organizations gathered in Beijing, with Norway serving as guest country of honor for the first time and the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region appearing as guest province; UNCTAD and the World Intellectual Property Organization jointly co-hosted related summit events for the first time. This is also the first edition held since Shougang Park was established as CIFTIS's permanent, fixed venue starting in 2025.

This year's fair continues the long-standing theme of "Global Services, Shared Prosperity," with this year's work focused on "expanding openness, deepening cooperation and leading innovation." Under the schedule, September 9-11 are trade-visitor days open to industry professionals and buyers, while September 12-13 shift to public open days, allowing ordinary residents to tour the exhibits up close. The fair also featured, for the first time, a dedicated "China Services" case exhibition, showcasing more than 140 innovative cases spanning 12 key service-trade sectors, with cases related to artificial intelligence, large models and AI agents accounting for nearly 40% of the total — reflecting how AI has become one of the most active areas of innovation in China's service trade. As this year's guest province, the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region set up a dedicated exhibition area focused on cross-border service trade with ASEAN, logistics-corridor development and specialty industries in border regions, highlighting Guangxi's position at the front line of China-ASEAN cooperation and seen as a microcosm of CIFTIS's expansion into regional and sub-regional cooperation.

The rapid iteration of China's large AI models in recent years also provided important context for this year's AI exhibition zone. Over the past year, several domestically developed large models — including Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, Alibaba's Qwen (Tongyi) and DeepSeek — have released upgraded versions or gone open-source, with Kimi K3, at 2.8 trillion parameters, becoming one of the world's largest open-source large models, seen as a landmark moment in the continued growth of China's open-source AI ecosystem. Industry insiders note that against this backdrop, this year's AI-related exhibition areas drew a large number of exhibiting companies and institutions, showcasing both underlying large-model technology and agent-based applications tailored to specific sectors such as government services, finance and manufacturing — reflecting how AI is accelerating its shift from the laboratory to front-line, industrialized applications in service trade.

One highlight of this year's fair was the wave of new technologies, services and solutions making their debut. Reports indicate that more than 100 companies and institutions, including Alibaba and Xinlianyuan, showcased over 100 new products and services spanning artificial intelligence, healthcare, cultural exports, and green and low-carbon fields. In the telecommunications sector, for example, China Telecom demonstrated on-site at Shougang Park its "digital employee" and TeleAgent products, capable of autonomously handling corporate business tasks, and unveiled a local gateway platform that can customize AI solutions for corporate clients, claiming tasks such as contract review can be handled without uploading corporate data to the cloud — balancing intelligent automation with data-security needs, and seen as a representative case of telecom operators expanding commercial AI applications.

The fair's opening also coincided with positive signals in China's service-trade statistics. Data previously released by the Ministry of Commerce showed that in the first six months of this year, China's total trade in services reached 1.5047 trillion yuan, up 17.6% year on year; within that, knowledge-intensive service exports totaled 805.67 billion yuan, up 12.8% year on year and accounting for 53.5% of total service exports, with exports of personal cultural and recreational services and intellectual-property royalties growing particularly fast, at 57.2% and 44.3% respectively. Analysts say the figures point to an important inflection point in the structure of China's service trade as it shifts from traditional labor-intensive services toward knowledge-intensive, higher-value-added services, which now account for more than half of China's service exports. Some analysts describe the trend as China's service trade moving from "manual labor" to "brain work" — with the share of traditional labor-intensive exports such as transport and construction gradually declining, while exports of technology- and knowledge-intensive services such as software, intellectual property and digital content continue to rise, a structural shift vividly reflected in the large number of AI and digital-service cases on display at the fair.

As a flagship national platform for trade in services, CIFTIS has continued to grow in scale and influence in recent years; this year's edition, with 90 countries and regions and more than 1,800 exhibiting companies, marked a clear increase over previous years. Observers say that against a backdrop of rising global trade protectionism and technology and investment barriers erected by some countries, China's continued signaling of expanded openness through platforms such as CIFTIS not only helps attract more international companies and institutions to its service-trade market but also provides a new platform for global cooperation in trade in services. Arrangements such as Norway's debut as guest country of honor and the first joint hosting of summit events by UNCTAD and WIPO are also seen as concrete steps by China to deepen multilateral cooperation and raise CIFTIS's international profile.

Notably, this year's fair is also the first held since Shougang Park was formally established as CIFTIS's permanent venue. In previous years, the fair had repeatedly changed or split its venues; from this edition onward, Shougang Park has been designated the permanent "one venue, one site" location, meaning the flagship national exhibition platform's operations are becoming more standardized and institutionalized — helping with long-term venue planning, investment promotion and support services, and offering exhibitors and visitors a more stable and predictable environment. As of now, there have been no public reports of major security or organizational problems at this year's fair, and crowd flow during the September 9-11 trade-visitor days remained generally orderly. With the shift to public open days starting September 12, the fair is expected to draw more Beijing residents and domestic and international tourists, further raising its public profile and impact.