Technical Barriers And China’s Foreign Trade

As China is the world’s largest exporter, foreign trade is an important part of thenational economy. Especially under the correct guidance of reform and opening-up policy,China formally joined the WTO in2001and China’s GDP surpassed Japan to become theworld’s second-largest economy in the second quarter of2010. After35years of reformand opening-up, China’s economic development has created remarkable achievementsand foreign trade played an active role of it, which should not be ignored. From2009to2013, foreign trade showed the continuous growth and the total import and exportvolume has reached4.16trillion US dollars by the end of2013in our country. Accordingto the statistics by general administration of customs, the average annual growth ofimport and export value is over20.2%since China joined the WTO for more than10years and customs tax in2013is5times at the beginning of joining the WTO in2001.Under the influence of the financial crisis and debt crisis of US and EU, theeconomic recovery of developed capitalist countries is relatively slow, while theemerging economies showed buck the trend and rapid development in China, especiallyfor foreign trade, which increased in stability, had outstanding performance. In such a bigbackground, the technical barriers of trade have quietly become a more and moreprominent phenomenon of international trade. Our country’s foreign trade suffered moreand more trade technical barriers and product coverage is more and more big, which leadto the increased loss year after year. Only in2012, the loss of China’s foreign tradereached58.241billion US dollar caused by the technical barriers implemented by othercountries. In post-crisis era, the new trade protectionism and trade technical barriers withthe features of concealment, universality and discriminatory are widely used by different countries, especially Europe and the United States and other developed capitalistcountries to become the guise of trade protectionism for developed countries. Technicaltrade barriers has constituted a serious threats on our country’s international trade andcaused great economic losses, so our country must face the fact and find thecountermeasures for technical trade barriers implemented by the developed countries toenable the orderly, healthy and steady growth of our country foreign trade and promotethe sound development of national economy in China.In this article, we fully understand the definition, characteristics, action mechanismand development trend of technical barriers through consulting domestic and foreignrelevant references, data and cases of technical barriers and through empirical research,normative analysis and other research methods. We analyzed the current situation andreason of technical barriers implemented by our country in recent years and the impactsof them on China’s foreign trade, especially for negative impacts in our country. It’s thepurpose for this study to attempt to find out the deep reason for suffering technicalbarriers and summarize the experience of dealing with technical barriers from both thegovernment and the enterprises in our country. Then we’ll find the strategy to deal withcurrent trade technical barriers implemented by other countries from the aspects of themacro (government) and micro (enterprise) levels, thereby valuable suggestions areprovided for the development of foreign trade in China.