A Study On The Structure Of China's Agriclultural Trade In East Asia

Agriculture is about the basic living of people, and agricultural products are playing important roles in each country's trade. Many East Asian countries are big agricultural countries. Among them, China is the largest country with vast arable fields, which has considerable agricultural output each year. Also, it has relatively strong complementarities with major East Asian countries in agricultural trade structure. These features make the relationship between China and Japan, South Korea and ASEAN countries very close. Meanwhile, as the continuous development of East Asian Economic Integration, China's agricultural products will be sure to confront with more opportunities and challenges in the large consumption market of agricultural products in East Asia.From this point, the article is attempting to research on the agricultural trade between China and other major East Asian countries, the competitiveness and complementarities of their agricultural products, and opportunities and challenges of East Asian Economic Integration to agricultural products of China and other major East Asian countries, by using related theories and methods. Also, it gives some suggestions to the development of agricultural trade between China and other East Asian countries. All these are important and meaningful to enlarge China's trading scale within East Asia, realize complementary advantages of trade with other East Asian countries, and increase each country's benefits etc.There are five sections in this article.The first part is the introduction. It introduces the background and international situation, gives reasons and meaning, and explains important professional terms of the article. The second part shows the development of agricultural production and trade in East Asia. First, it gives a summary of primary countries' agriculture in this region, from the aspect of resource endowment and agricultural production. Then, it analyzes the development of agricultural trade of major East Asian countries, especially for China in recent years, by using data from Agriculture Statistic Yearbook.The third part mainly analyzes the competitiveness and complementarities of agricultural trade of China and other East Asian countries. First, the article uses Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) index to make a comparison on the competitiveness of East Asian countries' main categories of agricultural products. The result shows that although China doesn't have a RCA in agricultural products in general, it has certain comparative advantages in labor-intensive products. Japan and South Korea are typical agricultural import countries, who have a RCD in almost all kinds of agricultural products. The comparative advantage in agricultural products in Southeast Asian countries is obvious, although different countries have comparative advantages in different kinds of agricultural products. Generally speaking, ASEAN countries have RCAs in land-intensive agricultural products. Then, the article applies the Intra-Industry Trade Index (IITI) to analyze competitiveness and complementarities of agricultural products between China and other East Asian countries. The result shows that the agricultural trade of Sino-Japan and Sino-South Korea are nearly inter-industry, which indicates strong complementarities of bilateral agricultural trade structure of Sino-Japan and Sino-South Korea. The analysis of agricultural intra-industry trade between China and ASEAN countries indicates that inter-industry trade still plays an important role, especially for the trade of staple agricultural products, although the proportion of intra-industry trade of some kinds of agricultural products is relatively high.The fourth part addresses opportunities and challenges of East Asian Economic Integration to agricultural trade of China and other major East Asian countries. It expatiates in two aspects. One is about the reasons and development of East Asian Economic Integration. The other is the analysis of opportunities and challenges of East Asian Economic Integration to agricultural trade of major East Asian countries, especially for China.The last part is the conclusion. The article lists many recommendations, such as adjusting the production structure and enlarging the export of advantageous products, improving the product quality and developing green (unpolluted) food, reforming the management system of China's agricultural trade, pushing forward trade cooperation and avoiding trade conflicts, establishing rural cooperative economic organizations, actualizing agricultural industrialization management and reducing the production cost of agricultural products, establishing the risk precaution system and improving the self-protection ability to external impacts and promoting the development of regional trade.