BEIJING - China's foreign trade volume this year is expected to hit a historic high by exceeding $2.9 trillion, but growing trade protectionism targeting China will continue to pose serious challenges next year, said the Ministry of Commerce.

Zhong Shan, vice-minister of commerce, also strongly suggested that China more actively conduct trade-remedy cases against some imports in a reasonable way to help the domestic industries fend off fiercer competition at home and abroad and to guarantee local industrial safety under accepted principles of the World Trade Organization.

"China's foreign trade has been in fairly good recovery, and the whole-year trade volume is set to break $2.9 trillion," Zhong said during a trade-remedy forum on Friday.

At the forum, the ministry released the 2010 Report on Global Trade Friction, which says that during the past 10 years, emerging markets including China, India and South Korea have been major targets of trade protectionism worldwide.

Zhong's forecast means China's foreign trade will exceed the pre-crisis level this year. In 2008, before the financial crisis, China's foreign trade was at $2.56 trillion, and last year it dropped to $2.2 trillion.

According to the Chinese customs service, from January to November China's exports and imports were at $2.68 trillion, a 36.3 percent increase over the same period last year.

But compared with the high-level growth rate of the nation's foreign trade, "growth for China's trade surplus has been lagging far behind" because of increasing international trade protectionism against China, Zhong said.

During the first 11 months of this year, China's trade surplus declined by 3.9 percent year-on-year to $170.4 billion, with exports growing by 33 percent while imports surged by 40.3 percent.

Since late 2008, China has been a major target of trade protectionism worldwide. In 2009, there were 127 cases filed by trade partners against China, the largest number ever, and during the first half of this year, 13 nations and regions initiated 37 cases against China, 29 fewer than the same period last year.

Despite the decline in case numbers in the first half, the prospects are not positive.

"We believe trade-remedy cases will grow in the future, that more emerging and developing nations will become the initiators, and more cases will target China's high-end goods," Zhong said.

Zhou Shijian, senior fellow at the Center for US-China Relations at Tsinghua University, agreed. "As the unemployment rate continues to be high in the US, trade-remedy cases targeting China will surge to a new high in the next two years, and China has to ready itself for that," he said.

The US, European Union and India have been the main initiators of the cases, but this year, countries such as Argentina and Turkey, also joined in. And more of the cases are directed at China's high-technology and value-added products, as evidenced by the recent clean-energy investigation and many 337 investigations by the US.

During the first half, China initiated only two anti-dumping cases, three fewer than the same period last year.