The global COVID-19 pandemic has not subsided, and the quarantine caused by the epidemic and restrictions on the movement of people across regions have also affected international trade. In this context, will there be new changes in the division of labor in global value chains, and what are the characteristics of globalization?
At the 2021 North Bund International Shipping Forum, which opened on November 4, Yao Yang, dean of the National Development Research Institute of Peking University, shared his views: the global industrial chain has not been broken, and integration is still accelerating.
Yao Yang said that since the outbreak of the epidemic, many people believe that globalization is decelerating and the global industrial chain is breaking, but at present, these things have not happened, and the integration of the world is accelerating. The shipping industry plays an important role in the process of world integration. China's shipping industry can not achieve today's results, inseparable from the increase in China's economic (global) share, especially with China becoming the world's largest manufacturing country.
Yao Yang said that after the epidemic, the proportion of China's economy and trade in the world has increased by leaps and bounds, indicating that the integration of China and the world has not declined because of the epidemic, but has gone deeper. In the long run, China has also taken the initiative to participate in another global integration triggered by the global emission reduction issue, "China has a huge productive advantage in the field of (energy conservation) emission reduction".
In his view, not only China's economy, but also globalization is quite resilient. Based on the current division of labor in the world industry, the industrial chain of a product is very fragmented, and each country only does a certain point in the middle. More than 90 per cent of world trade is intermediate trade, not consumer goods. The achievements of China's shipping industry are precisely because China is the world's production base.
Yao Yang explained that China has a huge market, production network, etc., which make China's economy strong and resilient, and then attract foreign investment. "We can see that the industrial chain is not broken. The vast majority of foreign companies are increasing investment in China, because China is a huge market. For example, Tesla's Shanghai factory has only been in operation for more than a year and has sold more than 50,000 vehicles in a month. (Editor's note: According to the data of the Association, Tesla China's sales reached 56,006 vehicles in September, an increase of 27% month-on-month and a year-on-year increase of 394%).
From the data point of view, trade frictions and the epidemic have not prevented the integration of China and the world.
"Our country's total trade volume and import and export growth, in addition to the decline when the epidemic first occurred, the total amount of trade in the past year or so has risen in a straight line." He said.
According to data from the General Administration of Customs, the total import and export value of China's trade in goods in the first three quarters was 28.33 trillion yuan, an increase of 22.7% over the same period last year. Among them, exports were 15.55 trillion yuan, an increase of 22.7%; imports were 12.78 trillion yuan, an increase of 22.6%. Compared with the same period in 2019, China's foreign trade imports and exports, exports and imports increased by 23.4%, 24.5% and 22% respectively.
Li Kuiwen, spokesman of the General Administration of Customs and director of the Department of Statistical Analysis, said at a press conference of the State Council New Office that in the first three quarters of this year, China's foreign trade imports and exports continued to maintain a relatively rapid growth trend, and the high-quality development of foreign trade also achieved new results.