BEIJING, Jan. 11 (Xinhua) -- China will take necessary measures to protect Chinese enterprises' interests if the United States sticks to unilateral protectionist trade practices, the Ministry of Commerce said Thursday.

The U.S. trade investigation targeting China is based on its own laws and regulations and will compromise the international trade framework, Gao Feng, a spokesperson of the ministry, said at a press conference in response to a U.S. Section 301 investigation into Chinese intellectual property and technology transfer launched late last year.

Gao pointed out that the trade imbalance between the two countries is mainly a result of different economic structures, industrial competitiveness and international division of labor, and China has never sought a trade surplus as the flow of trade is determined by the market.

China saw a trade surplus of over 251 billion U.S. dollars with the United States in the first 11 months of last year, up 9.7 percent year on year, but the growth of imports from the United States outpaced that of exports, according to Gao.

China will release trade data for December and the whole year of 2017 on Friday.