In recent years, at the same time that China has pursued multilateral trade negotiations via membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), it has increased its participation in free trade agreements at either the bilateral or the regional level.

Since 2000, while actively pursuing trade liberalization under the framework of the multilateral trading system, China seems to have come to see free trade agreements as useful devices for dealing with trade relations with regional neighbors. For example, in Southeast Asia, China concluded the China–ASEAN Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in 2002 and has since then reached further agreement with ASEAN to reduce tariffs among participating countries. Furthermore, China has proposed free trade arrangements with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization which includes countries such as Russia, Kazakhstan and so on. In Northeast Asia, China has proposed establishing an FTA with Japan and the Republic of Korea and the three countries have established a joint committee to study the feasibility of such an arrangement.

In Latin America, China has concluded FTAs with Chile and Peru and has proposed FTAs with countries such as Brazil. China has reached out to developed countries such as New Zealand and Australia through the conclusion of FTAs and has made FTA overtures to Switzerland.

However, some of the exceptions built into China’s FTAs may not only exacerbate the difficulties of subsequent liberalization at the regional or multilateral level, but could also potentially reinforce the negative aspects of the so-called‘spaghetti bowl’ effect of regional trade integration. It is possible that such FTAs like the placed wide range of important industrial products could reinforce protection of sensitive domestic sectors, thus reducing incentives to pursue multilateral liberalization initiatives at the WTO. In particular, there are two cases that could effectively undermine the political support for multilateral trade liberalization in the future: 1. Domestic interest groups that have successfully resisted FTA trade liberalization are able to drag out the process of multilateral liberalization within the framework of the WTO.  2. Export sectors that have benefited from the enhanced access to key export markets made possible by FTAs lose incentives to push for multilateral trade liberalization.

In addition, the proliferation of FTAs with widely different rules may threaten the simplicity and predictability of the global trading system centered around the WTO. The widely varying forms of China’s free trade pacts may also exacerbate the difficulty of harmonizing them into broader arrangements toward trade liberalization in the future. While not all bilateral and regional FTAs are inherently discriminatory, there nevertheless remains a real possibility for such patchworks of protectionism to erode the gains from multilateral trade liberalization.

 

 

Источник: Ka Zeng, Journal of Contemporary China (2010), 19(66), September, 635–652

http://web.waseda.jp/gsaps/eaui/educational_program/PDF_2/PKU_WANG%20Yong_Reading1_Multilateral%20versus%20Bilateral%20and%20Regional%20Trade.pdf