China's pursuit of free trade agreements: Is China exceptional?

ABSTRACT China is widely viewed as exceptional in its free trade agreement (FTA) activity for two reasons. First, the existing literature on East Asian regionalism has treated China as a strategic unitary actor. Second, Chinese policy elites claim that China is exceptional for its ‘big country morality’ of seeking to provide agreements that benefit smaller countries. What drives China's trade policy in the ‘post-WTO’ era? More precisely, does China, as a state ruled by a Communist Party, have different factors affecting its FTA policy-making than do other states? Is China pursuing FTAs ‘with Chinese characteristics’: are the motivations behind China's FTAs different from those of other countries? The research presented in this paper finds that China's FTA policymaking process involves a lot of bargaining and is particularly affected by the relative weakening of liberalizing forces vis-à-vis protectionist ones after the WTO accession. Moreover, the effectiveness of economic diplomacy is affected by coordination problems between economic and political sections within the government. Although China has a few motivations that go beyond what drives other countries to FTAs, those expectations are either difficult to realize or not very useful even if realized.