Reanalysis Of Contemporary China's International Power

In traditional international relations(IR)theory,“status” is often equated with “power” and the competition of the military power and the economic power is regarded as the core of international power competition.Later,“identity”,“soft power” and other new concepts has been added to IR power theory for the explanation of international power structure but most of them were qualitative analysis.Some scholars have begun to use indexes such as military expenditure,GDP,balance of trade etc.to quantify and analyze a state's international power.However,as the economic globalization deepens,the segments of each complete domestic production chain in each state started to scatter around the world,which finally promoted the formation of the global value chain(GVC).Nowadays the old IR theory seems fail to explain the new international structure of GVC.The main reasons lies in two aspects.On the one hand,with the accelerating global co-production process and rapid flow of production factors across the world,international specialization has been reconstructed in the age of GVC and this causes the increasing economic interdependence among states,which makes economic strength especially the net value-added ability weighs more than military strength in the international competition.One case is that some western developed countries,represented by the US,has occupied the upstream of GVC and taken control of the international specialization network,which has also raise and then consolidate their international status.On the other hand,traditional trade statistics only consider the final product value and repetitively count the value of imported intermediate goods in the total value of the export goods.This makes the measure and the result not reliable and lack of the explanation of a state's net revenue.Therefore,a new statistical method and new theory are needed to explain the new situation in the age of GVC.This paper used WWYZ's GVC participation index and GVC position index which is based on the production decomposition model to measure the position of Chinese manufacturing industry and its sub-sectors in the global value chain and also make some international comparisons.The data is from the latest national input-output data of WIOD which includes the data of Year 2000 to 2014 and the data from UIBE GVC database.The result shows that Chinese manufacturing industry's position has been promoted and has an upward trend.By contrast,some western developed countries experienced a decline in this period and notably Italy and Russia has been exceeded by China.This exactly corresponds to the recent international political structure.Then this paper use G7's declining influence in the global governance as a case to clarify how a state's status is related to its GVC position.That is,their domestic industry hollowingout makes their power in the GVC declines and some developing countries represented by China has relatively promoted their position in GVC which also promote their voice in the global governance.This can also explain why the US began to implement the reindustrialization strategy after 2008 financial crisis.Therefore,GVC theory seems to be a new theoretical tool for the analysis of contemporary international power structure.Additionally,the measuring result also reflects that China is still ranking at the middle and lower segment of GVC and have a gap compared with those developed countries who have experienced a decline but still occupy the upstream of GVC.Therefore,this paper also summarizes the industrial upgrading and transformation experience of developed countries and put forward five suggestions for improving the position of China's manufacturing industry in GVC.Firstly,China should promote the upgrading of factor endowment structure and the transformation of comparative advantage.Secondly,China should improve the independent technological innovation ability based on technology import.Third,China should attach more importance to marketing and brand operation and cultivate competitive multinational companies and industrial clusters.The fourth is to build regional value chain rely on One Belt One Road.The last is to develop green manufacturing and achieve sustainable development.