Study On The Legal Issues Of Cross-Strait Trade Liberalization

In recent years, the economy and trade exchange of cross-strait is becoming increasingly frequent, and its cooperation in trade liberalization is gradually turning into reality from conception, which is not only the inevitable trend of long term development of cross-strait economic and trade relations, but also positive integration of the Cross-strait blood.The value of the topic of this paper lies in that the cross-strait has the intention of signing agreements of trade liberalization, but its specific schedule and content are still in negotiation, therefore, it is novel and prospective to study this subject before the formal signing;at the same time, the research materials are relatively deficient due to its higher novelty, so it is required to study some trade liberalization models for reference and put forwards suggestions based on summarizing former experience and deficiency, which makes a higher demand for analysis and induction ability on the researcher.This paper can be divided into four parts except for introduction and conclusion:The first part mainly analyzes and expounds factors promoting cross-strait trade liberalization from three aspects: first, it is a necessity to the development of cross-strait economic and trade relations; second,, it is global trend of regional economic integration; third, ASEAN "10 +3", "10 +1" brings "marginalization" crisis to Taiwan.The second part introduces the origin of the current tentative free-trade agreement ECFA and afterwards discusses the legal basis of ECFA, which is grounded on analysis of the legitimacy of cross-strait signing the ECFA. Due to deficiency of domestic law in this field, this paper is mainly composed from the perspective of international law. In the sense of international law, the basis of ECFA mainly includes Article 24 of GATT and its"understanding", "Enabling Clause" in 1979 Tokyo Round and GATS Article 5. The three legal bases provides the legal underpinning for the ECFA in the areas of trade in goods, trade in services and trade-related investments.The third part is primarily focused on the model selection of cross-strait ECFA. In order to position ECFA more clearly, first, it introduces several more frequently adopted models in regional trade liberalization, such models as customs union, common market may not have practical significance for the present cross-strait economic and trade relations, however, considering the four-regions of China are bound to form a "Greater Chinese Economic Circle" after the future return of Taiwan to the motherland, it is of referential significance to introduce these models. After that, it makes independent assessment of the relations between CEPA and China ASEAN Free Trade Area and cross-strait in consideration of their overlapping and similarity. And it is considered that a suitable trade liberalization model can be found based on the two models.The fourth part is the core content of this article. After analysis and comparison in preceding paper, this part expounds legal issues which may arise in the process of cross-strait trade liberalization. The content is more detailed and demonstrated from the field of trade in goods, trade in services, trade-related investments and dispute settlement mechanisms. It is focused on rules of origin, "Early Harvest" program, definition of "service provider", especially "Legal provider" in trade in services, conception on the facilitation measures of cross-strait trade and investment and dispute settlement mechanisms. Discussions of these issues constitute the main results of this study.Since the process of signing ECFA is not clear, it is unable to find out in whose name the cross-strait will sign ECFA, which model ECFA will finally select and its specific sectors and the content. This paper is based on the current regional trade liberalization patterns, so it is inevitable to focus on the problems in these models when the legal issues are discussed. Although the formal ECFA may be quite different from the selected mode, content construction and concrete system in this paper, it is still expected that this paper can provide some referential significance.