Research On Cultural Industries And Cultural Trade Among The Three Countries Under The Background Of Preparing To Establish China-Japan-Korea FTA

Nowadays, Chinese culture “going global strategy”, construction of culturally powerful nation and Chinese rejuvenation have become the general plan for China, which has become the consensus among the official, producing, studying and researching circles, and gradually gain important position in common people’s heart. Ten cool words have appeared in the NPC and CPPCC held in 2015, among which “Creator”, “Made in China 2025 Strategy”and “Internet Plus” are eye-catching terms closely related to cultural and creative industries. Our modern society has stridden into the era of “being supported by high-end manufacturing industry and cultural industries.”Meanwhile, negotiations on the China-Japan-Korea FTA(hereinafter referring to “CJKFTA”) are progressing steadily. The 6th round chief negotiator representative meeting was held in January, 2015 in Tokyo Japan. The three parties continued to disscuss the tax reduction model on goods trade, service trade, investment opening means and the scope and fields covered by the agreement. But due to the historical and political reasons, it is very diffult for the three countries to successfully enter into the agreement of FTA, while the cultural industry and cultural trade may seve as the break-through point of the negotiation. Therefore, the government and the academic circles are in bad need of the relevant research on the cultural industries and cultural trade among the three countries under the background of preparing to establish the CJKFTA.The object of the current research covers the development of the three countries’ cultural industries and cultural trade under the background of preparing to establish CJKFTA and the trade rules for the future CJKFTA. Therefore, based on the understanding of the status quo of the three countries’ cultural industries and cultural trade and their positions in the map of the world cultural industries and cultural trade, the three mail research questions are put forward:(1) What are the features of their trade structure and international competitiveness of both of their cultural industries and cultural trade?(2) What are the influencing factors on the cultural trade flows of the three countries and to what degree of their influences?(3) What are the export trading potentials among the three countries and between the three countries and their 25 trading partners?The findings to the three questions will provide solid theoretical and statistical support for the cultural trade rules of the future CJKFTA. Centering around the research questions, the dissertation is divided into the following 9 chapters:Chapter 1 is the introduction, briefing the background, significance of the research, the mian content and research methodology adopted in the research and the difficult points to overcome and the tentative innovations to achieve.Chapter 2 is the literature review, focusing on the former researches on cultural industries, cultural trade, the feasibility of CJKFTA and the cultural industries and cultural trade among the three counties home and abroad, with the purpose to have an overall view of the latest research trend and findings to provide basis and rationale for the current research. Besides, based on the literature review, the author tries to find the limitations with the current researches so as to try to find out some break-through points.Chapter 3 focuses on constructing the theoretical framework and analytical models relevant to the current research. The dissertation attempts to draw the relevant theories from the perspectives of cultural economics, international trade, Porter’s competitive advantage theory and sociology and the two mainstream analytical models—“Diamond Model” and “Trade Gravitation Model” to patch an overall framework to provide a theoretical foundation and analytical tools for the qualitative and quantitative researches and provide rational explanation to the research findings and also received the verification of the researching results.Chapter 4 tries to make the comparison and contrast on the status quo of the three countries’ cultural industries. Based on Porter’s Diamond Model, the five main factors deciding competitiveness of their cultual industries are compared and analyzed.Chapter 5 is quantitatively comparative research on the three countries’ trade competitiveness. In this Chapter, the TSI index for cultural goods trade, TC index and RAC index for cultural service trade, Intra-industrial index and trade intensity index are calculated and compared. The calculation results are also compared with the former researches in the former years made by other researchers so as to gain an in-depth understanding of their trade structure and its dynamic changes.Chapter 6 studies the influencing factors on the three countries’ cultural trade flows and their export potentials. Based on the latest findings and application of the trade gravity model, the author chooses the data of the core cultural products between China, Japan, Korea and their same 25 cultural trading partners between 1996-2013 to construct panel data to do the multiple regression. The factors incorporated in the current research include GDP, population scale, personal GDP, geographical distance, cultural distance, language similarity and APEC membership.Chapter 7 moves on to do the research on the current international organizations, current FTAs concerning their trade rules and main cultural countries in terms of their cultural industries and cultural trade policies, with the purpose to make a summary of the international rules in order to know ourselves better and know other parties better, together with the findings from the qualitative and quantitative researches from Chapters 4-6. Therefore, the author could provide more and detailed references for drafting the trade rules for the future CJKFTA.Chapter 8 provides suggestions on the cultural industries and cultural trade rules of the future CJKFTA. In this Chapter, the author puts forward suggestions on China’s cultural industries from the three levels of government, enterprises and talent cultivation. Based on the research results from Chapters 4-7, suggestions and recommendations concerning trade rules for the future CJKFTA are also put forth from 10 aspects.The last chapter is conclusion, summarizing the main findings of the current research, listing the limitations with the research and pointing to the direction for further studies.The main findings of the current research include the following points:(1) The cultural industries of China is still labor-intensive and manufacturing-driven, while Japan’s is technology-and-capital-driven and Korea’s governmental policies-driven.(2) As for the competitiveness of cultural trade, China and Japan have comparative advantage over Korea in the fields of photographic or cinematographic goods and musical instruments, while China has competitive disadvantages over Japan and Korea in terms of publishing products like books and newspapers. As for the competitiveness of cultural service trade, Korea is the most competitive, and then China and then Japan, because Japan is a large cultural service consumption country.(3) In part of the intra-industrial trade index, the manufacturing-based products like crafts and musical instruments, China-Japan and Japan-Korea belong to inter-industrial trade, which is due to the different economic levels of the three countries; the creativity-based fields, like the photographic or cinematographic goods, books and video games, the intra-industrial trade dominates the three countries, which is due to the consumption overlapping of the three countries.(4) According to the regression results based on the trade gravitation model, no matter whether the three countries are regressed as a whole or they are regressed separately, the export, import and total trade flows have been influenced by the factors of GDP, population scale, person GDP, geographical distance, cultural distance, language similarity and APEC membership. Among all the independent variables, the influence of the personal GDP is much larger than that of GDP, and cultural distance much larger than the geographical distance. The influence of the language similarity is very salient to the three countries. And the APEC membership has bigger influence on China and Korean than on Japan. All these reflect the special features of cultural trade. Therefore, our country needs to take all the measures to develop the economy and improve people’s real living standards. At the same time much more attention should be paid to the cultivation of the talents who are proficient in foreign languages and possess cross-cultural competence.(5) As for export potentials, the cultural export between China and Japan is over-heated, while the export potential from China to Korea is larger than that from Korea to China, and the export potential is quite large both from Japan to Korea and from Korea to Japan. China, Japan and Korea have sufficient export to the countries like US, UK and France, and still have very large export potential with Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia, Russia, Canada, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and Arabic countries.Based on the above-mentioned findings, the dissertation puts forward suggestions concerning China’s further development in cultural industries and cultural trade from the levels of government, enterprises and talent cultivation. With regards to the trade rules of the future CJKFTA, the tentative suggestions are also provided from the aspects of promoting the cooperation in crafts, publishing products, video games, animations, travel and creative city construction, outsourcing of content creation, the opening of the investment fields and the roadmap as well as maintaining cultural diversity and national cultural security.Therefore, the main possible innovative points of the current research include:(1) Based on the quantitative research, not only the indexes concerning competitiveness of cultural industries and cultural trade and complementarily of cultural trade are calculated and evaluated, but the further empirical research is made by collecting the three countries’ panel data based on trade gravitation model. Based on the regression results, the export potentials of the three countries are also calculated, compared and evaluated to provide detailed figures for the suggestions on the trade rules of the future CJKFTA. This is the biggest innovation of the current research.(2) The theoretical framework not only is constructed on the relevant theories in the fields of economics and international trade, but also based on Porter’s management theories and sociological theories with the purpose to exploit and expand the theoretical field and attempt to enrich the research content.(3) Based on the qualitative and quantitative research results, providing some constructive suggestions on the cultural trade rules for the future CJKFTA is somewhat forward-looking and has practical and realistic significance.