Chief negotiator Zhang Xiangchen said agriculture, services, government
procurement and investment would all be covered in a free trade agreement (FTA)
under negotiation with Australia.
Canberra's increasingly warm political links with Beijing had played an
important role in framing China's commitment to choose Australia for its "most
complicated, important and comprehensive" bilateral trade deal to date, he said.
"Five years after joining the World Trade Organisation, we need to take
another big step forward in trade, and it is good for us to have this experiment
with Australia rather than with other developed countries," he told The
Australian.
Speaking on Friday after talks with Australian officials in
Beijing, Zhang said that at the next round in September the countries would
discuss the size of the deal each will seek and concede on manufactured goods
and agriculture.
Exports to China soared 46 per cent to $16 billion and imports grew 19 per
cent last year, when China overtook the US to become Australia's second-largest
trading partner after Japan.
On resources, which dominate Australia's exports to China, Dr Zhang said: "We
don't need to spend a lot of time in the FTA on this. It's quite obvious all the
tariffs will go to zero."
Agriculture, he said, would be easier for China to settle than services, in
part because it was easier to forecast the capacity of Australia's farmers, and
thus the trade impact.
"You have very good quality of products and good price and good potential in
agriculture, in grains, sugar, wool, cotton and other products – land-intensive
products. And we are very interested in horticulture exports to Australia.
"We assume that after the FTA we shall export more manufactured products. But
much depends on the development of Chinese industry in the context of
globalisation.
Location and production and marketing are now quite
global, and many Chinese producers, for instance of cars, are joint ventures,
and are subject to global strategies."
He said that "after a long debate, we agreed everything should be put on the
negotiating table", including investment, though to provide Australian investors
with easier access would involve "fundamentally changing the current regime
involving hundreds of laws and thousands of domestic regulations".
Talks began a year ago, but the first four rounds comprised an exchange of
information rather than negotiations. Last week, Australia led the shaping of
future talks by tabling the 15 chapters likely to be included in the final
agreement, though without many of the crucial figures.
