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As the US-China conflict intensifies, the United States is pursuing a ‘decoupling’ strategy to build a new world trade order, arguing that the current World Trade Organization (WTO) system does not properly regulate China's non-market economic system. The WTO provides special and differentiated treatment (S&DT) for developing countries. The United States argues that China should give up its developing country (DC) status. Sufficient research on the DC status and S&DT has not been conducted as a means of resolving the US-China conflict. Decoupling means the collapse of the global supply chain (GSC), which will bring substantial shock to the global economy and a catastrophe for China. This paper examines the re-classification of DC status and S&DT in the context of US-China conflict and seeks an approach for China to avoid decoupling and coexist with the United States. It would be an optimal way for China to revive the WTO first and to improve its economic system through negotiations under the WTO.

During the process of reform and opening-up, the structural transformations of the Chinese economy have two significant leaps forward and demonstrate a process of “rural area–industrialization (urban industry and rural industry)–urbanization” development powered by the main engine of economic growth.

These two leaps forward resulted in transitions of economic structure in China. In the author’s view, structural transformations are closely related to China's economic reforms and can be divided into clear phases.

The structural transformations have two significant leaps forward and demonstrate a process of “rural area–industry (urban industry and rural industry)–urban area development” powered by the main engine of economic growth.

This paper reviews and summarizes the development and structural transformations in China’s economy over the last 40 years. The author believes that China’s economic miracle is accompanied by dramatic changes in its economic structure, which is particularly characterized by the ongoing process of transition from a traditional agricultural economy into a country with high industrial output, from industrialization into urbanization and from a planned economy into a market economy.

Although officially ended in July 2020, China’s dispute about its non-market economy (NME) status at the World Trade Organization (WTO) is far from being resolved. The NME status enables China’s counterparts to disregard Chinese prices in antidumping proceedings and instead use the so-called surrogate country methodology. This paper aims to structure and analyze the complex debate, which emerged with the disputes China has filed against the European Union and the USA at the WTO, and therefore provide a point of reference for future analysis of and debates about China’s NME status.

The analysis is based on the existing academic literature on the topic and on the legal WTO-related documents (e.g. multilateral agreements, China’s Accession Protocol, legal findings of the WTO dispute panels).

Four different interpretations of the respective legal documents about China’s NME status are discussed and strong and weak aspects of these interpretations are pointed out. Also, several misunderstandings and mistakes appearing in the debate are clarified.

As the question of China’s position at the WTO and its NME status has not been resolved yet and some authors believe that China will pursue its case again once the WTO Appellate Body revives its functionality, the analysis of the debate can serve as a point of reference for the academic debate and the future research on this topic. Moreover, it offers an introduction to China’s NME position at the WTO for the newcomers to this topic.

Although China’s NME status has been much discussed, there is no literature review that would structure the debate and point out some of the (dis)advantages of the respective arguments and interpretations. Rather than adding to the large corpus of literature about the NME status, this study takes this corpus as the object of its analysis.

Trade and environment are essential issues closely related to the development of the national economy and the improvement of people’s livelihood in the new era. The Report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) listed the construction of a strong trading power as an important part of building a modern economic system and pollution prevention and treatment as one of the three key battles to win the decisive victory of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects. However, the relationship between trade and environmental pollution is still very controversial in the existing literature, and there is a paucity of literature on the relationship between trade and environmental pollution based on micro data.

This paper merged China’s Firm-Level Pollution Database with China’s Industrial Enterprise Database and China’s industry tariff rates. Additionally, by virtue of the quasi-natural experiment of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), a difference in difference (DID) model was constructed to alleviate the endogeneity issue.

According to the results, the trade barrier decrease (trade liberalization) significantly reduces the intensity of SO₂ emissions, a major pollutant of enterprises, as the intensity of SO₂ emissions decreased 2.16% for each unit decrease of the trade barrier. The analysis of the mechanisms shows that the SO₂ emission intensity of enterprises is mainly due to the decrease of enterprises’ pollution emission rather than the decrease of output, and the decrease of enterprises’ pollution emission is mainly caused by the enterprises’ cleaner production process rather than the end treatment of pollution emission. The decrease of coal use intensity is an important mechanism of the decrease of SO₂ emission intensity caused by the decrease of trade barriers. Among the technical effects of the change of the trade barrier affecting enterprises’ pollution emission, biased technical change rather than neutral technical change dominates.

The findings of this paper imply that expanding openness can enhance China’s social welfare not only through the economic growth mechanisms identified in the classical literature, but also through environmental improvements. This provides useful policy insights for promoting the construction of a strong trading power and winning the battle against pollution in the new era.

This paper employs the gravity model to investigate how the growth of China’s textile and clothing (T&C) exports is displacing the exports of other Asian developing countries over the 1990-2015 period. Aggregate analyses were undertaken, and the endogeneity of Chinese exports were accounted by applying instrumental variables with country fixed effects. It was found that there was a negative impact of China’s emergence on T&C exports on other Asian developing countries. We further explored whether such displacement effect varies across Asian countries and the results showed that a more pronounced effect was found in low-income countries than high-income ones. Our findings suggest that the export competitiveness of China’s neighbors, i.e. both more and less developed Asian countries, are affected by the emergence of China in T&C Trade. The implications of China’s One Belt, One Road initiative are also discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to use China’s World Trade Organization accession as a quasi-natural experiment and examine whether conglomeration affects firmss’ ability to respond to a significant increase in competitive pressure. Conglomerate segments have higher sales growth and higher profitability than singlesegment firms, when they face intensified import competition. Conglomerates’ outperformance is not observed when the markets in which segments operate already have high product market competition. Overall, conglomeration encourages competitiveness, and internal resources are allocated to relatively competitive segments.

Among various distinctive formulations that have been developed simultaneously in East Asia as of 2009, this paper selected three major paths, ASEAN+3, ASEAN+6 and APEC, to quantitatively examine the economic impacts of Asian regionalization with the CGE model. This paper confirmed previous findings such as the magnitude of economic impact being proportional to the size of membership and the existence of trade diversion effect within all trade blocs. The subsequent KORUS and Korea-EU FTA imposition upon the built CGE base models further verified the effects of hub-and-spoke-ism in East Asia. Jointly, the simulation results implied that the economic impacts of a trade arrangement heavily depend on the subject economy’s reliance on trade with the participating states. It was also found that the impacts were directly proportional to the accrued trade balance of the subject spoke country with both the hub state and the hub-destination. This could have been exaggerated as the scope of this study was limited to East Asia where KORUS FTA was found to be more influential than Korea-EU FTA due to its exceptionally high reliance on the US. On the course of this research to verify the aforementioned findings, however, both GTAP 6 and 7 were adopted, and hence, the economic impacts of China’s accession to the WTO in the global trade system were also empirically proven.

Vietnam has been actively integrated into a multilateral trading system based on its accession to the WTO and the implementation of a series of ASEAN+1 FTAs. Now Vietnam is negotiating to be a member of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, which is a region-wide FTA in the Asia-Pacific region, and a total of 21 working groups have been negotiating 29 chapters of the TPP. This paper tries to assess major issues of Vietnam’s joining the TPP, and to draw policy implications such as initiatives for Vietnam’s acceleration of its renovation and economic restructuring programs; and domestic measures for facilitating FTA implementation by firms and enhancing the country's implementation capacity.

The purpose of this paper is to review the four large and two small fluctuations in China’s economic growth since the reform and opening up, which can be further divided into five periods of economic upturn and six periods of economic downturn.

This paper also analyzes the performance, causes and practical countermeasures of these fluctuations and summarizes the experience and lessons from the eight aspects of dealing with economic downturn and stabilizing growth since the reform and opening up.

At last, the paper puts forward some measures to cope with economic downturn and stabilize growth under the new normal in the new era.

Any country’s economic growth is a tortuous process with many fluctuations. The rate of economic growth cannot rise or go down straight for a long time, and China’s economic growth is no exception. The drastic fluctuations of economic growth can lead to serious overproduction, waste of resources, increased unemployment, decreased income or supply shortages, rising prices and decline of living standards.

The paper aims to explore the impact of marketization on forestry economic growth. Firstly, the development process of forestry marketization was summarized. Secondly, from the three dimensions of forestry production factor marketization, production marketization and product marketization, the framework of marketization is constructed by the authors.

Based on the yearbook data from 1978 to 2016, the relationship between forestry marketization and forestry growth was demonstrated through multiple regression and Granger test in this paper.

The results showed that forestry marketization was one of the important driving factors that impacted on China's forestry economic growth. Since the reform and opening up, China's forestry marketization degree has been constantly strengthened, but there is still room for improvement. China has provided an important model as forestry marketization reform and development sample for the world.

Many useful references and inspirations have been provided from China such as gradually promoting market-oriented reforms; paying attention to the important role of reform and opening up in the construction of market mechanism; dynamic coordination of market and government relations; developing and connecting the relationship between domestic and international market; and coordinating the development of forestry state-owned economy, private economy and mixed ownership economy.

This paper creates a measure index of forestry marketization from three dimensions of forestry production factor marketization, production marketization and product marketization.