With China accounting for as much as 23% of transnational data flows, and AI increasingly transforming traditional economic sectors and business models, China’s stringent data localization requirements have sweeping implications for global trade, investment, and innovation. Rebecca Arcesati and Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau explain how Beijing deploys party-state control over all levels of data flows in its digital ecosystem. In its two decades of engagement with the WTO, the world’s largest trading economy has upended the multilateral trading system. Henry Gao asks: What have we learned? Policymakers have increasingly turned to economic sanctions to address major geopolitical crises in the recent past. What effects do these coercive instruments have on human rights in target countries? Dursun Peksen asks. Holly Smith breaks down an OECD paper on the nature of trade configurations combining goods and services.
MERICS-HINRICH PAPER
China’s party-state control over data flows
Rebecca Arcesati
Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau
5 December 2023
Beijing has considerably strengthened its control and visibility over China’s data flows through party and state agencies including the Cyber Administration of China and the National Development and Reform Commission, as well as through a range of data exchanges, platforms, and clearinghouses that sit in strategic positions in China’s financial, economic, industrial, and social structures. Increasingly, privately owned Chinese and foreign firms alike must navigate intrusive party-state control over data transfers, both within China and across borders, Rebecca Arcesati and Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau of MERICS write in a special essay for the Hinrich Foundation.
Lessons from China’s 20-year engagement with the WTO
Henry Gao
Damian Raess
Ka Zeng
5 December 2023
China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 ushered the integration of the world’s largest transitional economy into the rules-based multilateral trading system. China’s engagement with the WTO has transformed the power dynamics within the WTO and presented unparalleled challenges to the functioning of the organization due to both the size of its economy and its unique economic model. Hinrich Foundation Advisor Henry Gao and co-editors Damian Raess and Ka Zeng unpack the lessons learned in a new book.
Economic sanctions have assumed a prominent role in global politics since the turn of the twenty-first century. But what effects do these coercive instruments have on human rights in target countries? asks Dursun Peksen in this piece originally published in the East Asia Forum Quarterly.
Interactions between goods and services in international trade
As goods sold in international trade increasingly incorporate services, trade rulemakers need to consider how existing customs valuation rules and rules of origin address these products and the challenges they present. Holly Smith breaks down this policy paper from the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD).
-min.png?upscale=true&width=88&height=88&upscale=true&name=JeroenGroenewegenLauB%2BW-modified-min%20(1)-min.png){kind=small}
-1.png?upscale=true&width=1120&upscale=true&name=STI%202023%20eDM%20banner%20(2)-1.png)
