Research On Intra-production Specialization And China's Exports To The United States

Since the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States in 1979, bilateral trade has maintained rapid development. But the growth rate of China's exports to the U.S. is far higher than the growth rate of imports, causing the increasing China-US trade imbalance which has brought a series of trade frictions on the RMB exchange rate, market access, textile trade and intellectual property protection, etc., and has hindered the normal development of China-US economic and trade relations. Therefore, how to correctly view and handle the issue of China's exports to the U.S. has great impact on the healthy development of China-US relations, especially on the trade relations.With the strengthening of economic globalization, the boundary of international division of labor is changing from the industrial-level, product-level to process-level. The role of product process is enhancing, while the industrial boundary is weakening. Intra-product specialization has become a new way of international division of labor. The theory of intra-product specialization breaks the prerequisite that a product cannot be separated, gets closer to the reality, providing a theoretical basis for correctly understanding the China-US trade patterns.Firstly, the paper makes a theoretical description of the concept, the real forms and the causes of the intra-product specialization as well as its impacts on trade patterns. Then, the paper describes the features of China's exports to the U.S., which is compared with the features of East Asia's exports to the U.S., and demonstrates the relationship between China's imports of P&C from the East Asia and China's exports of final goods to the U.S. from the level of P&C and final goods. After, the paper quantitatively analyzes the role of China and the U.S. in the international division of labor, through calculating the RCA index and TC index. Finally, the paper makes an empirical analysis of the content of China's participation in the intra-product specialization.This paper argues that in the context of the intra-product specialization, China imports intermediate products from East Asia and exports to the United States after domestic assembly into final goods. China has developed into the export platform of East Asian production network, which means the rapid growth of China's exports to the U.S. is the transfer of the other East Asian economies'exports to the U.S. in some extent.