Peter Gallagher

“The build­ing of Free Trade Areas has become a new era of open­ing up of China’s new strat­egy. Hu Jin­tao, gen­eral sec­re­tary of the party’s 17 largest in the report, “Free Trade Area of the imple­men­ta­tion of strat­egy”, Pre­mier Wen Jiabao in his gov­ern­ment work report in 2009 pointed out­that “free trade zone to speed up the imple­men­ta­tion of strat­egy.” In the cur­rent world finan­cial cri­sis con­tin­ues to spread, the FTA deal with the cri­sis in our coun­try to co-ordinate the two mar­kets and two resources will pro­vide greater room for maneu­ver, while main­tain­ing the steady growth of China’s imports and exports play a sig­nif­i­cant pos­i­tive role in . “Extract from Google’s trans­la­tion of MOFCOM statement

MOFCOM believes that FTAs hold the promise of new export oppor­tu­ni­ties for China—especially for the slug­gish State Owned Enterprises—during the eco­nomic reces­sion. FTAs also offer access to lower-priced imported goods at home and they give China a big­ger voice in inter­na­tional affairs (as if that were nec­es­sary!) by help­ing to build coali­tions of sup­port for China’s views in inter­na­tional forums. A high qual­ity FTA can lead to deeper lev­els of eco­nomic inte­gra­tion and avoid unsta­ble or unpre­dictable events in bilat­eral trade.

Noth­ing unusual here: those are pretty much the same things that any gov­ern­ment nego­ti­at­ing an FTA would be look­ing for, includ­ing Aus­tralia. The impor­tant ques­tion is whether MOFCOM means it when they talk about ‘speed­ing up’ the nego­ti­a­tions of these agreements.