On East Asian Regional Cooperation II: Ideality and Reality by Yunling Zhang

Author:Yunling Zhang [Zhang, Yunling]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351206761
Goodreads: 42526486
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

Looking for innovative ways

To build an FTA with the 10 ASEAN countries and to regard the 10 ASEAN countries as a whole in negotiations, China needed to be creative, i.e., find a suitable way for itself. First, the FTA had to be accepted by China and all ASEAN members and be supported so that the negotiation process would not be interrupted or protracted. Second, it needed to take into account that China was a developing economy and that there would be big differences in the development levels and focus of interests between ASEAN members; thus, there needed to be different opening arrangements and effective contents of economic cooperation. Of course, the construction of the FTA needed to be innovative and reflect flexibility and inclusiveness, but China and most of the ASEAN members were WTO members; therefore, the FTA construction would comply with the basic principles of the WTO multilateral system. In this way, the negotiation progress of the CAFTA would not come up with many new ideas. From China’s perspective, the most important thing was to consider its ability to negotiate step by step from easy to difficult, and to progressively promote and implement the agreement in line with China’s national conditions. From ASEAN’s perspective, it had its own AFTA and many arrangements associated with the FTA; the ASEAN-China FTA (ACFTA) should be integrated with the AFTA, including the structure of market opening etc. China appreciated the progressive and differential arrangements of the AFTA, for they were also in line with China’s ideas. Therefore, China and ASEAN had many consensuses on some of the major principles, which made the framework arrangement and the negotiation process relatively easy.9

The Framework Agreement document provided the guiding principle for the construction of CAFTA, of which the most prominent was the Early Harvest Program. The so-called “Early Harvest” refers to the earliest open market arrangements, or the earliest selected open fields before the negotiations on a comprehensive market opening. These areas were given special consideration on the ability of individual ASEAN members to participate in them and the benefits that would be derived by the underdeveloped ASEAN members. The Early Harvest Program, also known as the fast track in the area of trade in goods of the CAFTA, was launched on January 1, 2004, covering the main range of products in the customs tariffs from the first chapter to the eighth chapter, involving more than 500 agricultural and fishery products.10 However, due to economic differences between ASEAN members, they needed to be considered differently. For example, in the discussions, some ASEAN members worried that it was difficult to reduce and eliminate the tariffs of all the products in the first eight chapters of the customs tariffs according to the Early Harvest Model. In order to reflect the care for these countries, the two parties agreed that those products in difficulty could be regarded as “excluded products” in the Early Harvest Program with no need to participate in early tax reductions. Kampuchea, Laos, the Philippines and Vietnam presented some excluded products.

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