Some 70 percent Chinese business people expect export demand to pick up remarkably next year, according to an official survey released.

The survey, based on 5,016 valid questionnaires and released by the Chinese Entrepreneur Survey System, showed that most of Chinese business people believed the recovery of overseas market demand would be a gradual process.

Some 46.1 percent of the respondents nationwide believed that overseas demand would improve considerably in the second half of 2010, while 24.8 percent of them thought this would happen in the first half of 2010.

The survey also found 45.4 percent of the firms saw a price drop for their export products. The figure was 10.7 percentage points higher from a year earlier, showing the adverse effects of the economic slowdown was still under way.

The system is run by the Development Research Center of the State Council, the National Bureau of Statistics and other governmental agencies.