Political Economy Analysis On U.S. Trade Policy Towards China

With the rapid development of globalization and the growing economicinterdependence among countries, the economic relationship between China and UnitedStates is becoming more and more closely, which had influenced or even changed theinstitution of these two countries and the whole world. As the first and second largesteconomies of the world, China and U.S. has become the second largest trading partnerwith each other. The United States is China's second largest trading partner, largest exportmarket and the first big trade surplus countries; While China is America's third largestexport destination and the largest source of imports, the United States is China's fifthlargest investment market and the third largest technology import source. But more thanplain sailing, there also existed a lot of frictions and conflicts in the process of the tradedevelopment between China and the United States. China's rapid development and a"peaceful rise" in the world forced the United States to review its overall strategytowards China; under the condition of the economic recession caused by the financialcrisis and the rising of protectionism domestically, United States tended to inflict moreintervention in China's foreign trade policy, which cause the increasingly tendency of"politicising" on trade issues between China and the United States. Under thisbackground, the Sino-U.S. trade policy has interacted in quite different ways and newdirections. On this account, further study on the decision-making mechanism hiddenbehind the two countries trade phenomenon has great theoretical and practicalsignificance. It can deepen our understanding to the complicated Sino-U.S. traderelations, help us to grasp and predict the right direction of Sino-U.S. trade, so as tooccupy the initiative in the changing of the international system.Starting from the phenomenon of "politicisation" of trade problem between Chinaand the United States, this paper examines into the mechanism of decision-making oftrade policy hidden behind the trade phenomenon. Based on the theory of politicaleconomy of trade policy and the three dimensional “system-state-social" analyticalparadigm, the paper a comprehensive framework to analyze the U.S. trade policy towardChina, deconstruct the interactive trading game between American and China, and has carried on the qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis on several typicalAmerican trade policy toward China.This paper consists of six parts including one chapter of introduction and fivechapters in the main text.The introduction part to the selected topic background andsignificance, domestic and foreign related research progress were reviewed, then thepaper the research contents, research methods and possible innovation of thepresupposition, and the paper further research direction was thinking;The first chapter isrelated to the economic analysis of trade policy and political theory, according to thesystem-state-social analysis paradigm, the author build the comprehensive analysis ofAmerican trade policy toward China research framework, and reconstructed thetheoretical model of trade policy; The second chapter on the development of sino-ustrade relations and the evolution of American trade policy toward China, revealing thedifferent stages of the American trade policy and what is the determinant of formation,thus laid a logical starting point for the analysis of the full text, for subsequent empiricalanalysis provides the theoretical proposition;The third chapter is the analysis of thedecision-making mechanism of American trade policy toward China, and China's wtoaccession and PNTR issue, for example, analysis of PNTR legislation through theprocess of political and economic and what is the decisive factor;The fourth chapter isbased on the issue of RMB exchange rate, for example, against America's China policydecision factors for empirical analysis. Through the method of time series related topolitics, economic factors that result in the change of RMB exchange rate of the variableto build Var model, separately for each variable is obtained by pulse test and variance testthe impact of currency appreciation of the renminbi cycle length and the size of thedegree of conclusion;Fifth chapter for the international system structure changes underthe new tendency of American trade policy toward China, including the United States to"return to Asia" strategy will promote the TPP agreement, the United States to revivemanufacturing which may impact on China, finally come to the conclusion andsuggestion.