Introduction

In the last two decades China has claimed itself a major center of global trade and manufacturing activities. The Chinese economy has demonstrated unprecedented growth through its national policy of reform and opening up to the outside world following Maoist isolationism and disarray stemming from the Cultural Revolution. But while this has led to tremendous social welfare gains in China and has contributed to global trade in significant ways, Chinese manufacturers have also had to confront their trading partners in the advanced industrialized world over a mounting range of trade disputes. For example, not only were Chinese manufacturers and authorities increasingly presented with antidumping suits initiated by China’s major trading partners, they also have had to respond to Washington’s pressure to revalue the Chinese currency, the RMB, and have clashed head to head with the United States over protective duties on products such as furniture, semiconductors and automobile parts. The tone of US trade relations with China seems to have harkened back to the height of US-Japan trade relations in the 1980s. It is not an exaggeration to say that China will become one of the main rivals of the United States in the area of trade policy and that China is likely to remain a central concern of US trade policy in the years to come. These growing causes of trade friction between China and the US raise important questions both about the sources of these conflicts and the future orientation of US-China trade relations. They also raise questions about the process of trade policy-making in China which, up until now, has remained rather opaque to outside observers.