방송통신 분야 중국 FTA의 특징 및 시사점

초록

Joining the WTO, China seems to promote market-opening at the multilateral dimension and regional as well by signing a series of FTAs since 2003. However, it is widely accepted that China, in spite of the commercial merit arising from its huge market, maintains various tangible or potential trade hurdles to overcome. In particular, communications is recognized by Chinese government as a sensitive sector of high linkage with the national security and the formation of public opinion, so that it has been reluctant to liberalizing communications market. That said, there is a keen interest on how things turn out in the Korea-China FTA negotiations to be scheduled to launch this year. In this context, this paper is to analyze China's market-opening commitments on telecommunications, broadcasting, and computer and related services in the FTAs that have been signed by China and gone into effect during recent several years, vis-a-vis its commitments at the time of the WTO accession. This would allow us to probe further into the main features of China's trade barriers and market-opening strategies in communications. The research outputs show that China counts the multilateral WTO regime, regardless its entrance into worldwide FTA march, and is quite passive in opening its communications market. Moreover, China is not likely to give up this strategic stance at the upcoming Korea-China FTA. Based upon the speculation, it is suggested for the Korean government to seriously consider consulting key issues on communications at the DDA negotiations where Korea could increase its bargaining power through the collaboration with other countries, instead of being exposed to the risk of unilateral market-opening by forcing itself to seek a compromise as a matter of single-undertaking in the FTA negotiations with China.

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