China's service trade went up 9.4 percent year on year to top 3.27 trillion yuan (about 504.21 billion U.S. dollars) in the first eight months of the year, the Ministry of Commerce (MOC) said on Sunday.

Of the total, service exports reached approximately 1.55 trillion yuan, up 25.3 percent year on year, and service imports stood at 1.72 trillion yuan, down 1.8 percent year on year.

The country logged a marked drop in service trade deficit during the period as the growth of service trade exports outpaced that of imports by 27.1 percentage points.

In the first eight months, the deficit of service trade stood at 171.67 billion yuan, 515.62 billion yuan less than the same period last year, MOC data showed.

Compared with the same period in 2019, however, service trade dropped 8.4 percent, with service exports up 22.6 percent and service imports down 25.4 percent.

In August alone, the country's service trade reached 462.47 billion yuan, up 24.8 percent year on year.

Trade in knowledge-intensive services rose in the January-August period to reach nearly 1.48 trillion yuan, up 12 percent year on year. The figure accounted for 45.1 percent of the total service trade.

Knowledge-intensive service exports increased 16 percent from a year ago to 803.82 billion yuan, accounting for more than half of total service exports, while knowledge-intensive service imports rose 7.5 percent to 671.6 billion yuan.

Trade in travel services continued to decline, said the MOC.

In the January-August period, trade in travel services dropped 30.1 percent year on year to 506.48 billion yuan as countries around the world continued to take strict measures to restrict people's cross-border movement.

China has taken a slew of measures to widen the opening-up of the service industry and pledged to make more efforts to promote the opening-up of trade in services to a higher level.