Evaluating Chinese Standards Internationalization And Its Impacts On International Trade

Standardization has become an important measure for the Chinese economy to pursue development quality from development speed.The Chinese standards internationalization has become one of the key drivers for China deeply integrating into economic globalization and for Chinese enterprises improving their internationalization quality and scale.Reform and opening-up,economic development,"Belt and Road" capacity cooperation,“building a human community of shared destiny",and participating in the global governance all need the internationalization of Chinese standards.This Study adopts quantitative statistic and econometric methodologies to research the extent of Chinese standards internationalization in the past 40 years,and study the effects of Chinese standards internationalization on China’s import and export volumes.The Study proposes a theoretical model to evaluate standards internationalization,builds up an evaluation model for standards internationalization from such aspects as standard development internationalization,standards text internationalization,standards use internationalization and standards activities internationalization,and finally verifies the evaluation model with empirical data.The Study collects data in four dimensions of standards internationalization,including standard development internationalization data,standards text internationalization intensity/speed/validity data,standards use internationalization data and standards activities internationalization data,and builds a million-word-level Chinese-English standards corpus to explore the linguistic features,and finally works out the native proximity of English-translated Chinese standards.Statistics,text analysis,corpus and measurement model methodologies are applied in the Study.The following findings are the results of the Study:First,the Chinese standards internationalization is still on its preliminary stage,mainly being represented in the following four aspects:(1)As for the internationalization of standards development,the foreign stakeholders have only participated in developing 1.8% of total Chinese national standards,and no Chinese standard has been developed in a cross-border way.(2)As for the internationalization of standards text,the native proximity of English-translated Chinese standards is 89.87% compared with their international counterparts;but English-translated Chinese standards have obvious second language readability characteristics;only 34.70% of China’s current national standards have been in line with international standards or translated into English;the existing Chinese standards are 8.61 years lag behind the international standards on average;and the English-translated Chinese standards do not have the identical legal effect as the native language versions.(3)As for the internationalization of standards use,the international mutual recognition of Chinese standards is low,the standard recognition agreements signed between China and Belt & Road countries including UK and France only cover a small number of identical international standards;there are no Chinese standard adopted by foreign companies’ overseas projects.(4)As for the internationalization of standards activities,China’s participation in international standardization activities is high in quantity but low in quality,by the end of 2017,China had participated in about 900 TC/SCs,chaired 67 of them,and dispatched over 2000 registered standard development experts in ISO/IEC,but accumulatively organized the development of 333 ISO/IEC standards only.Second,Chinese standards internationalization and foreign trades have a longterm stable cointegration relation,and Chinese standards internationalization obviously promote Chinese foreign trades,mainly being represented as:(1)In the short term,the increase in the extent has a negative effect on the import/export volume and the export volume(-0.097020 and-0.204333 respectively),and a positive effect on import volume(0.024321)at the current stage,and no lag on the import volume.(2)in the long term,the increase in the Chinese standards internationalization extent will increase China’s import and export volume,total import volume and total export volume(1.732532,1.763353 and 1.699957 respectively).The Study has some contributions on theory,methodology and application.In the theory aspect,the Study explores the standards internationalization across corpus linguistics,language economics,internationalization theory,standardization theory and international trade theory,and attempts to construct a “theoretical model of standards internationalization" with four dimensions,providing a theoretical basis for examining the extents of standards internationalization in various countries.In the methodology aspect,the Study extracts 108 language features through a large-scale Chinese-English standard corpus,and constructs a set of methodology to measure standards text internationalization from four aspects: standards native English language proximity,standard text internationalization intensity,validity and speed;and the degree of Chinese standards internationalization is verified via using corpus analysis software,econometric software,statistical software and other computer software.In the application aspect,the standards language features summarized in the Study may be applied to translate Chinese standards.And the evaluation model of standards internationalization can be applied to measure the extents of standards internationalization in various sectors and countries,the assessment method for the impact of Chinese standards internationalization on foreign trade may be applied to foreign investment,project contracting and other areas.In response to the above findings,the Study proposes five countermeasures:First,timely and moderately expand the internationalization extent of China’s standard development.Allow more foreign stakeholders participate in the development of Chinese standards;expand inter-country,inter-city,and non-governmental development of standards,and achieve standardization project cooperation and bilateral and multilateral exchanges.Second,further expand the consistency of international standards;shorten the adoption period of international standards in China;study the simultaneous release of Chinese standards in both Chinese and English languages,and the possibility and path of equivalent legal effects of the English-translated standards.Third,change the internationalization path of Chinese standards use,pay attention to the substantive benefits brought by standards,and improve the overseas standard demonstration of Chinese standards.Fourth,improve the internationalization quality of Chinese standards activities.Fifth,set up national institutions to promote the internationalization of Chinese standards,fully participate in the global governance,and build a human community of shared destiny.