This year marks the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the Canada China Business Council (CCBC), a private, membership-based association that seeks to facilitate trade and investment between Canada and China.

In an exclusive interview with Beijing Review reporter Chen Ran, Sergio Marchi, President of the CCBC, shares his views on the current situation and prospects for Sino-Canadian trade links.

Beijing Review: Could you please review the role that the CCBC plays in promoting Sino-Canadian trade links? What are our trading prospects?

Sergio Marchi: I'm very proud of our thirty-year track record. Our main mission is to promote trade and investment between the two countries.

For much of those first thirty years, that meant trying to promote Canadian companies accessing and penetrating the growing Chinese market. I think in the next thirty years, we want to continue to do that work for Canadian companies and their success in this part of the world. What we would also like to do more is to welcome and attract increasing investments in Canada, because Chinese companies are growing and very much growing global.

We would like to play a constructive role in attracting Chinese and foreign investment for our benefit. We've had a first thirty years that has been a very proud achievement, while we celebrate our founding members and their entrepreneurial spirit; the way we will be able to honor them is by rededicating ourselves to writing a new exciting chapter in the Sino-Canadian trade story.

This year also marks the 30th anniversary of China’s reform and opening-up to the outside world. Do you see any changes in terms of the investment environment?

The thirty years of reform and opening-up has literally transformed China. The economy has been nothing short of breathtaking. You've had thirty years of virtually double-digit economic growth every single year, and so it's just been an incredible magnitude of growth, which means that the country has been transformed, perhaps more importantly from an international perspective. The role that China plays and the impacts that China has had on the world have been terrific. It is now clearly on the world stage as an economic and political leader.

The Sino-Canadian trade volume has witnessed rapid growth in recent years. China is Canada's second-largest single-nation trading partner after the United States, and its first in Asia. Which areas are mutually beneficial to our trade links?

There are a number of trading areas that are complementary. One is financial services, where we have some of our leading banks, like Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank and insurance companies, not only in Beijing and Shanghai but elsewhere across China. The transportation sector -- companies like Bombardier -- is very active and very successful, as are agri-food and processing, and natural resources. We have some of the leading Canadian mining companies active in China. So these are some of the areas that really offer a value-added contribution from Canada, a complementation in terms of Chinese needs.

What we also need to look to is maybe some of the new and emerging sectors. I think environmental technology is a good example. Because we have developed strong environmentally and technologically sound companies at the same time that the Chinese government has made a key priority in its Five-Year Plan on improving the quality of the air and the water, the quality of healthcare and education.

On the environment, there is no question that there are some challenges for China. There needs to be both a national objective, and we have to come to grips with those challenges in the face of your development. The benefit that the Chinese will have, which many economies did -- older economies like ours and the developed world -- is the environmental technologies. Today we have technologies that we didn't have thirty or fifty years ago, when we were going through our industrial revolution. So there is a way to control emissions, clean production, etc. As long as there is a will, we can also now find a technological way; and now we have to marry the technology with the political will. If we do that, we'll deliver our environmental aspirations not only in China but internationally as well.

So these are also newer emerging areas where both the public- and private-sector institutions in Canada can participate in assisting the Chinese Government in the quality of its growth, and at the same time the economic opportunities that flow from it.