1970-01-01 08:33:27
The impact of Sino-US disputes on the product quality and safety has been extending and escalating at present. There indeed exist some product quality and safety problems in several hundred billion US dollars worth of Chinese exports to the United States. Likewise, there is also this kind of problem in American exports to China worth hundreds of billions of dollars. These are nothing but indisputable facts.
This issue is not so difficult to tackle, if both sides swap information and go in for consultations and coordination with a good faith for friendship and cooperation, proceeding from the objective reality. Furthermore, if China and the U.S., proceeding from their overall bilateral ties, will work together to go on improving a mechanism of information exchange and consultation in the fields of product quality and safety supervision and inspection, these problems can not only be reduced drastically but addressed permanently in a fundamental way. So this option poses the right move for solution.
In fact, the issue on Sino-US trade imbalance is politicalized behind the product quality and safety problem existing between the two nations. Of China's total export value to the U.S., 23 percent comes from the value of imported intermediate products. In addition, 70 percent of China's exports to the U.S. is produced through processing trade, and China only yields less than 20 percent of added value within its territory, according to a study finding made by the Foreign Economic Research Institute of the State Planning & Development Commission.
In an era of ongoing economic globalization, the United States provides the world with the knowledge-type services and high technology manufacturing, and East Asia is bent on doing designing and intermediate products manufacturing, whereas China has partaken in the East Asia production web and international division networks with the crucial component of its labor force.
How the United States, as a global economic superpower, approaches its relationships with China, a newly-emerging nation with a population of 1.3 billion, poses an issue of utmost concern to ordinary Chinese. There exists a product quality and safety problem with export products of China, a big developing nation, and this is an objective reality. But it will neither be objective nor rational if the reality is invoked as a tool to "demonize" the country and to make a fuss in daily media reports on the negative information about its product quality and food safety to the neglect of immense efforts the Chinese enterprises have so far made and the ensuing evident progress they have scored in this regard.
China's export products comprise chiefly the labor-intensive products, which are mutually complementary but uncompetitive with the technology-intensive products of European and American countries. And in case of the occurrence of a trade friction or dispute, it victimizes Chinese export enterprises and also consumers in European and American countries.
To date, both the Chinese government and industrial enterprises have attached great importance to the issue of product quality and safety than ever before, and they are also resorting to effective, substantial measures for the sake of its solution. And as the market economy in China has turned more and more mature, its clients concern themselves more with their rights and interests as consumers than any time in the past.
This is also a fact and, in this process, there remain a few problems regarding product quality and food safety prevalent with the Chinese commodities for export. But clients worldwide now find the quality of China's export products improving and turning better still, and the country's guarantees on food safety more complete. This represents the only way for Chinese enterprises, and also the very road once taken by American and European developed nations.
Chinese firms require still higher quality supervision and inspection criteria and more rigid food safety procedures, greater understanding and goodwill criticisms, instead of excessive censures and misconceptions. Viewing from the height of economic benefit to be wrought to the people of both China and the U.S., the two nations should definitely step up communication, exchanges, and economic and technological cooperation on how to raise product quality and food safety, but no more trade wars and information twists and contortions.
By Zhang Yansheng, director general of the Foreign Economic Research Institute of the State Development & Planning Commission of China, and translated by People's Daily Online.