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Businesses form group to promote China trade Trade between Massachusetts and China has boomed so much in recent years that a group of local companies have banded together to form the Greater China Business Council of New England. The nonprofit council, aimed at luring Chinese businesses to Massachusetts and helping area companies to crack into China's huge market, will hold its ``inauguration'' Oct. 20 in Boston. ``There's just a huge demand for this,'' said Di Jiang, president of the new council and an intellectual property rights expert at Altus Pharmaceutical in Cambridge. Some of the heavy-hitter corporate backers of the group include Teradyne, Genzyme, New Balance, the Asian-American Bank and Analog Devices. Organization of the council began about a year ago with the help of the state- and federal-backed Massachusetts Export Center, a unit of the Massachusetts Small Business Development Center Network. ``It's a rapidly growing market for Massachusetts,'' said Paula Murphy, director of the export center. Only in recent years has China become one of the top 10 importers of goods manufactured in Massachusetts. The communist-dominated country, with a huge capitalist economy, last year imported $875 million in manufactured goods from Bay State firms, making it the seventh largest export market for companies in the state, Murphy said. Massachusetts' annual exports to China have jumped by 50 percent or more each year since 2002, Murphy said. The top exported products include electronic items, industrial equipment and computers, medical devices and pharmaceutical drugs. Published in the Boston
Herald
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