The challenge for Chinese enterprises to reevaluate their entry into WTO

Introduction: low price and good quality are the requirements of consumers for commodities, so they are also the goal of businesses But sometimes, the business has achieved the low price and good quality, which is not conducive to its products entering a certain market Do you believe in this logic? The lighters produced in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province are cheap and of good quality They are not only in an absolute dominant position in the domestic market, but also highly competitive in the international market Among them, metal lighters account for 80% of the European market However, the CR regulation proposed by the European Commission and possibly adopted in recent days will greatly affect China's lighter export The main contents of EU CR regulations are as follows: first, toy lighters are prohibited from entering the European market to prevent children from playing; second, each lighter with a price below 2 euros must be equipped with a safety lock to prevent children from opening If the first point is justifiable, the second point is the obvious discrimination against Chinese lighter exporters Our country exports 560 million lighters to Europe every year, and the price of each lighter is almost less than 2 euros At present, in the international market, except for the lighters made in China, the prices of other single lighters are almost all above 2 euros Lighter made in China is cheap due to low labor cost, but low price does not mean low quality These products have passed the safety test of international standards before export Therefore, in the face of the delegation of the lighter enterprises in Wenzhou, China, who went to negotiate, even the European Union itself admitted that it was not reasonable to link the price with the safety performance Lighter incident is a typical technical barrier for Chinese enterprises after China's accession to WTO There are also technical barriers such as tea, meat, aquatic products and clothing These technical barriers related to people's health and safety are called "green barriers" According to the statistics of the United Nations, about 7.4 billion US dollars of China's export commodities, including agricultural products, are blocked by "green barriers" Taking tea as an example, since November last year, the European Union, one of China's major tea export markets, has once again raised the test standards for imported tea and increased the test items for Chinese tea (from the original six residual pesticides to 62), which has reduced the export of Chinese tea to the European Union by 37% last year, and the export of Chinese tea to the European Union by nearly 30% from January to February this year I remember in last year's lively discussion on China's accession to the WTO, Fan Hengshan put forward a point: for China, opportunities are potential and challenges are realistic The technical barriers mentioned above are only one aspect of many challenges that Chinese enterprises have already encountered The numerous anti-dumping, anti subsidy and emergency safeguard measures against Chinese enterprises, DVD patent disputes, the shift of high-quality bank customers from Chinese banks to foreign banks, the brain drain from Chinese enterprises to foreign enterprises, and the enhancement of cooperation threshold for Chinese partners by some franchised multinational companies are all in the context of China's accession to the WTO New challenges faced by enterprises (including financial enterprises) In the past few months since China became a member of the WTO, one message after another from newspapers, TV, radio and Internet have reminded us that the challenges brought by WTO are faster and more severe than we originally estimated Challenges come faster and more quickly than expected, not that all of them are unreasonable In fact, the new challenges after China's accession to WTO are often the weak points of Chinese enterprises and even China's economic management system For example, the "Ericsson defection" event, which was so popular in the media, resulted from the Bank of communications being unable to provide Nanjing Ericsson with "non recourse receivables transfer business" Generally speaking, it means that the bank buys out the accounts receivable of the enterprise, so that the enterprise gets the much-needed fund discount The bank's buyout of the accounts receivable of the enterprise means that all the risks of the enterprise are transferred to the bank, while the domestic insurance companies are unable to provide credit insurance for the accounts receivable bought out by the bank at present, so the general Chinese banks cannot meet the requirements of Nanjing Ericsson This shows that in the face of WTO, not only our banking services, but also our financial management system and our insurance industry are under prepared What is also not well prepared is the independent intellectual property development of Chinese enterprises, the ability to cope with various non-tariff barriers, and the understanding of WTO rules and detailed agreements on China's accession to WTO Generally speaking, we should find more reasons from ourselves and more ways to deal with challenges from self-improvement But when things happen, we only find the reasons from ourselves, sometimes it is not conducive to the solution of the problem For example, in the lighter incident mentioned above, Chinese enterprises can say that there is no problem If they insist on "self inspection", it is only because the competitiveness of Chinese enterprises is too strong According to some data, the hourly wage of a worker working in a lighter factory in Wenzhou is 4-7 yuan, while that of a worker working in the same position in the European Union is 6-7 euros The advantages of Chinese enterprises are obvious But they don't talk about cost and competitiveness They just talk about the "insecurity" of products priced less than 2 euros, so they need to introduce laws to limit you Many of China's Antidumping products in the international market are similar to those of lighters In this case, if Chinese enterprises only choose patience and concession, they will undoubtedly hand over the market share that they can not easily share Looking at the trade friction encountered by Chinese enterprises in the international market in the past two years, it is not difficult to find that at least some cases are related to the process of China's accession to the WTO, and most of the areas where trade friction is encountered are those in which China has comparative and competitive advantages This is an interesting phenomenon: some of our advantageous industries originally thought that after joining the WTO, with the removal of foreign tariff barriers, they could make great progress, but in the end, they encountered more severe market environment, and the export was more difficult In fact, it is easy to understand that the reason why all WTO members want to join the WTO is simply to expand their own and regional interests within the framework of the WTO The reason why the original members allow China to join the WTO is not to do good deeds, but to open as much from China as possible without harming their own enterprise interests or their own enterprise interests as little as possible Get benefits in the market In short, self-interest is the first, others' interest is the second If we can get the benefits of other people's opening up the market by a large margin when we open our own market less, why not? We can't say that the old members of the WTO tend to discriminate against China as a new partner, but we can say that many members have a preventive mentality towards Chinese enterprises and have preventive countermeasures It's normal for others to guard against us The problem is how we think about it and how to deal with it For some industries and products without prospects, short-term improvement and long-term structural adjustment are necessary For example, tea, no matter whether the new detection standard of EU is reasonable or not, but the "organic tea" with no residue and high quality is always the development direction Now, we will suffer some losses in exchange for the early adjustment of the product structure, and we may recover the lost market in the future But for our products with obvious comparative and competitive advantages, such as labor-intensive products, we can not give up lightly, and can not only use the sentence "increase the added value, increase the technical content" as the whole countermeasure The adjustment needs to be adjusted, the negotiation needs to be negotiated, the lobbying needs to be lobbied, and the shouting needs to be loud This time, Wenzhou lighter enterprises formed a delegation to Europe to negotiate and argue, although no obvious results have been seen, but in exchange for a statement from the relevant parties of the European Union that "if the CR bill is passed, the law revision process will be started to be modified", and "learn to fight a lawsuit", far better than silence "When we look forward to China's implementation of its commitments to the WTO, it is very important that China's compliance with its commitments may depend on whether foreign markets can open up to China's products," a famous China expert and US economist said at the China development high level forum recently When we ask China to abide by WTO rules, we should also consider the issue of Chinese goods entering foreign markets The sober laddy said a fair word for China Of course, there are not many foreign scholars who understand China like lardy We have to do more on our own, just as Wenzhou enterprises are doing, just like the MOFTEC is doing To say that joining WTO brings fast and many challenges is not to say that it does not bring opportunities It is our opportunity to strengthen our weaknesses, improve our system, improve our competitiveness, learn to fight international lawsuits, and learn to cooperate with others in the competition I'd like to use a sentence that Mr Wu Jinglian said last year as the end of this article: opportunities come from challenges, from correctly dealing with challenges (author:) share to feed Weibo share to: