Topic: Industrial Relocation with Chinese Characteristics

Speaker: Researcher Yuan Song, Zhejiang University

Host: Professor Wu Ji from RIEM

Time: April 8 (Tuesday) 10:00-11:30

Location: Conference Room 1211, Gezhi Building, Liulin Campus, SWUFE

Organizer: RIEM

Speaker's Profile

Yuan Song is a researcher under the "Hundred Talents Program" and doctoral supervisor at the School of Economics, Zhejiang University. He previously worked at the Financial Department of the Ministry of Finance and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Warwick in 2022. His main research areas are development economics, public finance, the global economy, and economic history, with a current focus on China's outbound investment, infrastructure, and local government behavior. His research has been published in esteemed journals such as the Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Economic History, and Journal of Comparative Economics.

Abstract

Rising global political tensions and increasing use of trade policies are popularly seen as potential threats to globalization. Will these factors lead to the ‘decoupling’ of affected economies, or reshape relations between trade partners in more complex ways? We consider this question by studying the recent evolution of the economic relationship between China and the US, in the context of a sharp fall in direct China-US trade. Using firm-level and product-level data, we show that Chinese manufacturing investment and Chinese-produced parts have increasingly flowed to third-country ‘winners’ who have simultaneously increased their US market share. This suggests that Chinese economic actors have continued to participate in reorganized China-US supply chains. We present evidence that our findings capture expanding indirect relationships linking China and the US rather than broader economic trends within the ‘winners’ themselves.