On September 16, 2021, China submitted a written letter to New Zealand, the depositary of the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (CPTPP), to formally apply for China’s accession to the CPTPP, marking China’s entry into a higher-level free trade agreement. A solid step has been taken.
At a time when the trend of anti-globalization is prevalent and the world economic structure is undergoing major changes, the sudden new crown epidemic has caused a serious impact on the global economy, and external instability and uncertainty have greatly increased. Although China has taken the lead in controlling the epidemic and the economy has gradually returned to normal, the continuous repetition of the epidemic in other countries in the world has hindered the sustained recovery of the world economy. In this context, China’s formal application to join the CPTPP is of far-reaching significance. This marks that, following the successful signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP) between China and 14 trading partners in November 2020, China has continued to make strides forward on the road of opening up. This is not only focusing on the needs of stabilizing economic growth and promoting the high-quality development of the domestic economy, but also defending free trade with practical actions, injecting new impetus into the recovery of the global economy and maintaining economic globalization.
Compared with RCEP, CPTPP has higher requirements in many aspects. Its agreement not only deepens traditional topics such as trade in goods, service trade, and cross-border investment, but also includes government procurement, competition policy, intellectual property rights, and labor standards. Issues such as environmental protection, regulatory consistency, state-owned enterprises and designated monopolies, small and medium-sized enterprises, transparency, and anti-corruption have been regulated, all of which require China to carry out in-depth reforms of some current policies and practices that do not conform to international practices.
In fact, China has also entered the deep water zone of reforms. The CPTPP and China’s general direction of deepening reforms are the same, which is conducive to China’s higher level of opening up to push deeper reforms and accelerate the formation of a more complete socialist market economy. system.
At the same time, joining the CPTPP is also conducive to the formation of a new development pattern with the domestic cycle as the main body and the domestic and international double cycles mutually promoting each other. First of all, joining a higher-level free trade agreement will promote the opening of the outside world from the flow of commodities and factors to the opening of rules and other institutional openings, so that the domestic institutional environment will be in line with international standards. Second, joining a higher-standard free trade agreement will help my country to promote free trade negotiations with different regions and countries in the future. In the process of restructuring international economic and trade rules, it will help China change from the acceptor of the rules to the makers of the rules. Role switching.
Under the impact of the epidemic, the global economy has been hit hard, and the epidemic has repeatedly hindered the pace of recovery of the world economy. Without China’s participation, with the current scale of CPTTP, it would be difficult to take on the responsibility of leading the world to achieve a sustained recovery. In the future, if China can join the CPTPP, it will inject new vitality into the CPTPP and, together with other members, will lead the world to rebuild an open and prosperous trade pattern.
Post time: Oct-18-2021