The Policy Option Of Our Government For Rare Resources In The International Trade Business

At the beginning of reform and opening-up, our government has implemented a series of encouraging and preferential policies to the export-oriented economy and has gradually formed the outgoing-driven mode of economic development. This mode effectively attracts a lot of foreign investment, improves the economic structure and industrial structure and promotes the long-term, sustainable and rapid growth in the national economy. With the advantage of abundant reserves, rare resources have played an important role in China's foreign trade. However, we have in fact gone deep into the whirlpool of terrible trade environment and trade disputes although we are proud to be the leading power of rare resources in the world. After the financial crisis, resources especially the rare resources have become one of the most important factors to control one country. The developing countries try to change their economic development strategy from obtaining foreign currency by exporting resources into restricting the export of resources step by step, while the developed countries want to revive from the financial crisis quickly and further strengthen their own energy reserves. The relations between the two sides are therefore increasingly difficult. When the United States has sealed the biggest rare earth mine, Mountain Pass, California and when Japan has kept various important rare resources at the bottom of its territorial waters, our government starts to realize the seriousness of selling rare resource at low price and so tries to protect the rare resources in the way of export restrictions. However, this behavior has pricked the nerve of foreign countries. From June to August 2009, the United States, the European Union and Mexico presented the trade lawsuits to WTO successively, stating China's restrictions on nine raw industrial materials have violated the promise when China joins WTO in 2001. On February 2011, the preliminary ruling of this lawsuit came out stating that China does not have the legal right to impose export restrictions on the nine raw materials. From this trade lawsuit, we have been further aware of the importance of rare resources protection and urgency of rare resource strategic reserves.The current status of rare resources deserves our high attention. The blind and unordered exploitation along with the malicious price competition have resulted in the lack of pricing right in the international market, which reflects that our trade policies for rare resources have a lot of problems and really need to be improved. These problems are in fact due to the deficiency of our rare resources trade policies. Therefore, the trade policy for rare resources should be adjusted in order to protect the rare resource more effectively. This article consists of five chapters. Chapter One will start with the theory of current international trade policies and then propose the trade policy more suitable to our current trade development status under WTO system by comparing them. Chapter Two will introduce the current status of rare resources in our country and the problems existing in the trade policies, then analyze the reasons. Chapter Three will introduce the rare resource trade policies and strategic reserve system of some typical foreign countries which will be taken as the reference to adjust our rare resource trade policies. Chapter Four will give suggestions on the directions that our rare resources trade polices tends to be adjusted and then propose the solutions of our central government and local government. Chapter Five is the conclusion and prospect from the twelfth five-year plan.Rare resources issue is a world issue. The strategic importance and urgency are so obvious that our government should play a more active role to establish more practical trade policies to protect the limited rare resources and to bring benefit to our descendants.