The Cultural Goods Trade of China: Scale, Structure and Policy Implications

This paper seeks to examine the status and structure of China's trade in cultural goods during 2001-2010. Based on the United Nations commodity trade statistics database, this study investigates sources of difference in opinions among foreign and Chinese scholars. Results indicate that China's trade in cultural goods presents surplus status and its influence has been overemphasized. This study also highlight that Surplus is the "born" nature of the Chinese processing trade, not to mention 80 percent of the value-added is taken away by other countries. Other main findings includes: I. Proportion of core cultural goods is too low in total exports of Chinese goods and in cultural goods, with only about 1 percent in total and only about 20 percent in cultural goods exports. II. There is great disparity between Chinese cultural goods exports and imports, III. Trading partners are highly concentrated, with the United States being the largest one, which accounted for 47.2 percent of Chinese export and 27.8 percent of the import in 2010. IV. Most of China's exports of cultural goods are "hardware" rather than "content". This study also provides that policies should be established on the basis of "big culture" idea, which means to break sector and industry boundaries, strengthen the enforcement of intellectual property protection and promoting the competition of domestic cultural market.