East Asian Economic Integration And China-Australia FTA

Since the late 1990s, inspired and impelled by the success of the European Union, regional economic integration gained momentum in various parts of the world, resulting in North America forging the largest free trade area and East Asia accelerating its integration under the structure of ASEAN+3 (ASEAN-10 + China, Japan and Korea). Meanwhile, due to the inefficiency of World Trade Organization in dealing with the liberalization of trade and investment and non-tariff barriers, Free Trade Agreement (FTA) began to develop as a supplementing bilateral and multilateral cooperation mechanism in different regions of the world. As China's first FTA with one of the major developed economies in Asia Pacific, China-Australia FTA thus bears even greater significance.The dissertation aims to start off from a new perspective by combining the regional and bilateral aspects to analyze the role of China-Australia FTA in the process of East Asian economic integration. Through the examination on the respective attitudes and approaches adopted by China and Australia as well as the influence of the on-going free trade negotiations on both nations, this paper is intended to address the question whether the bilateral economic arrangement, namely, China-Australia FTA, is reinforcement or competition for the regional multilateral economic integration.