A Research On The Tendency Of The Foreign-trade Structural Change In China (1870-1931)

The paper explores the tendency of the foreign-trade structural change in China from the year 1870 to 1931, employing the theories and methods of history, international trade study and regional economics comprehensively. The whole paper is divided into five parts.The first part is the introduction, which mainly presents necessity and feasibility to analyze the structure of the Chinese foreign trade in the late 19th Century and early 20th century.The second part analyzes the geographical structural change of the Chinese foreign trade. During that period, Chinese domestic market was involved in the semi-colony and semi-feudal economic system, and a uniform domestic market hasn't been established. Dispersed local and regional markets have been embroiled in the world capitalistic market system, taking part in the cooperative international production. The changes of different regional markets were mostly affected by the strength of the exterior variable. Before the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, actually it was Britain that dominated Chinese foreign trade. After the war, because of the unbalanced development of politics and economy in the capitalistic world, Britain lost its dominant control of Chinese market. Instead, the U.S.A and Japan joined in the common reining of the Chinese market and gradually exceeded Britain in dominant status among the three powers.The third part of the paper concerns the structural change of foreign-trade products in China. The Chinese principal export was low technique-contained and low value-added raw products. Though the machine-made export increased a little, it enhanced quite slowly. It was because that the competitive power of Chinese industrial products in international market was so weak that it was difficult to exploit the market abroad. Furthermore, the labor-dense products dominated the export of the raw products, but its percentage descended and the export of natural-resource-dense products greatly ascended. Therefore, the export pattern which was dominated by the half-products and products was inclined to be leaded by raw material. In this way, the pattern of the export products was increasingly colonized.The main imports of China were far from the products which were extensively used in manufacturing or the raw material which could rarely be found in China. By contraries, the substitutes of most imports could be found in Chinese market and their price was comparatively low. The pattern which was dominated by the consumption material hasn't been changed. It resulted from the subordinate status of China in dealing with the commodity export and capital export of western powers, but not from the development of the Chinese modern industry.The Fourth Part studies the Chinese foreign trade in the late 19th century and early 20th century from the perspective of the trading structure. Though the export of silk and tea leaves encountered severe competition in world market in face of the same products from other countries, China still had some comparative advantages in exporting many kinds of agricultural and mineral products and handicrafts since China had rich resource and low-price labor force and its marginal cost of production was quite low. These advantages slowed down the forming of the foreign-trade pattern which was dominated by the import of consumptive industrial products and the export of agricultural and mineral products and handicrafts. When the disparity of the productivity between China and western countries continuously extended as a whole, western countries benefited more from the increasing price advantage, which leaded to the reducing of the comparative advantages of Chinese exports. At last, Chinese foreign trade could not avoid whole deterioration.