A Study On China’s Export Potentialities Of Cultural Products To RCEP Member States

At the 19th Communist Party of China National Congress,General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out that "cultural self-confidence is a more basic,deeper,and more lasting force in the development of a country and a nation." Promoting China’s cultural foreign trade and letting the world know about excellent cultural products that contain unique Chinese culture are undoubtedly important components of showing cultural confidence and enhancing cultural soft power.This depends on whether the competitiveness of China’s cultural industry is strong.The export of China’s cultural products can reflect the competitiveness of China’s cultural industry.According to a report released by UNESCO,the total value of China’s cultural products exports reached $60.1 billion in 2013,and China surpassed the United States as the world’s largest exporter of cultural products.However,at the same time,there are also some problems in China’s export of cultural products,such as unbalanced product structure,etc.Although China is a big exporter of cultural products,it is not a strong exporter.In this context,it is of great significance to study the problems existing in China’s cultural product export and the factors that affect China’s cultural product export.The situation at home and abroad has been complicated since 2018.Domestically,China was facing downward pressure on economic growth,and the government was pushing for the transformation and upgrading of economic development mode.Internationally,China was facing the resurgence of protectionism and unilateralism in the world;a series of policies of the Trump administration of the United States had a major impact on the global economic system,and the Trump administration provoked a Sino-US trade war and imposed high tariffs on Chinese products.Against such an unfavorable background,the regional comprehensive economic partnership,which began in 2012,provided timely help.RCEP member states ended negotiations on November 4,2019 and then started the review of legal texts,which was a positive signal for China and the world.RCEP is a regional cooperation agreement based on a higher level of free trade agreements based on WTO rules.If RCEP succeeds,it will be the free trade area with the widest coverage area and the largest population in the world.RCEP will bring positive trade effects to member states,which will also be applied to China’s trade in cultural products.With the support of intraregional trade liberalization policies,China can further promote the export of cultural products to RCEP member states.To sum up,in the context of the upcoming signing of the RCEP agreement,tapping China’s export potential of cultural products to RCEP member states will be of great significance to China’s cultural foreign trade and will also enhance China’s ability to cope with the risks of cultural trade protection as a whole.The framework of this paper is mainly divided into six parts:The first chapter is the introduction,which elaborates the research background,reviews the research results,and introduces the research methods,research contents,innovation points and deficiencies of this paper.The second chapter is the theoretical basis,defining the statistical scope of cultural products,introducing related theories,which lays the theoretical foundation for further research in this paper.The third chapter first introduces the progress of RCEP,and then selects the data of China’s exports of cultural products to RCEP member states from 2002 to 2018 to analyze the current situation and existing problems of China’s exports of cultural products to RCEP states.The fourth chapter constructs stochastic frontier gravity model and trade inefficiency model according to the characteristics of cultural trade,and analyzes its influence mechanism.The fifth chapter uses Frontier 4.1 software to empirically analyze the influencing factors and export efficiency of China’s cultural products to RCEP member states,and calculates the export potential.The sixth chapter is concIusions and suggestions,summarizing the main contents of the paper and putting forward suggestions to promote China’s export of cultural products to RCEP member states.The important conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1)At present,China’s export of cultural products to RCEP member countries has problems such as unbalanced product structure,low cultural value contained in products and unbalanced market structure of cultural products export.(2)The factors affecting China’s export of cultural products to RCEP member countries are as follows:The GDP of China and its trading partners,the population of the trading partners and the common language shared by the two countries all promote China’s export of cultural products,of which China’s GDP has the greatest positive impact;China’s population growth has a significant inhibitory effect on the export of cultural products;the geographical distance between the two countries has a negative correlation with China’s export of cultural products,but it is not significant;the cultural distance and economic system distance between China and its trading partners,as well as the average tariff level of trading partners,will increase the trade inefficiency and inhibit China’s export of cultural products;the signing of FT A between China and trading partners is inversely related to trade inefficiency,indicating that having a common free trade area is conducive to promoting the export of Chinese cultural products;the number of Confucius Institutes established by China in trading partner countries can offset some of the trade inefficiencies and promote the realization of export potential.(3)From 2002 to 2018,the efficiency of China’s export of cultural products to RCEP member states generally increased first and then declined,with an overall average of 0.4793.In addition,there is a large gap between countries in terms of export efficiency and export potential.The innovation points and deficiencies of this paper are as follows:The innovation points of this paper are mainly the innovation of research perspectives and empirical analysis tools.At present,the academic research on China’s cultural product trade is mainly based on the analysis of influencing factors,competitiveness and complementarity.But this paper studies China’s cultural product exports to RCEP member states from the perspective of export potential and uses stochastic frontier gravity model,which is innovative.The deficiency of this paper is that there may be some thoughtlessness in variable selection and current situation analysis.