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Using annual trade data from 1987 to 2016, this study focuses on the Chinese import trade patterns in garment, textile and footwear. We employ the indicators of net exports and revealed symmetric comparative advantage to generate H index to assess the divergence of the import policy. Our findings imply that 1) China has been comparative dis-advantageous in the imports of the low-technology garment, textile and footwear, and 2) the Chinese trade policy has been persistently restrictive towards the imports of the products. We document that the Chinese government may restrict the imports to improve the domestic employment. Introduction China is a country with comparative advantage in her textile products. This traditional wisdom has risen from the fact that China has had rich endowment in labor, especially since the 1980s when China carried out an outstanding economic structural change. The Chinese rural labor had begun to have more freedom to migrate, supplying more industrial workers for the Chinese labor-intensive industries including the garment and textile industry [1]. Some scholars document that the demographic dividend has driven China to facilitate the exports of the labor-intensive industries. In the views of free trade theories, an economy may specialize in and export the products which it has comparative advantages, and import those with comparative dis-advantages [2]. The specialization pattern and trade pattern guarantee that following the principles of free trade, all participants may gain trade benefits in trade. A logical inference of Ricardian free trade theories is that the higher the comparative advantage a country has in a certain product, the more exports it will achieve. The opposite also holds: the lower the comparative advantage (or the higher dis-advantage), the more imports a country will have [3]. Pang and Hong (2010) argued that the equilibrium condition for free trade is the net export capability equals to the comparative advantage in a certain product [4]. Hong, Guan and Su (2013) studied the Chinese trade patterns in goods and called the difference between the net export capability and the comparative advantage “H-index”, which reflects how much the trade patterns diverge from equilibrium. More literatures assessed the Chinese trade patterns in commodity trade [5][6][7] and trade in services [8]. Their findings show that China tends to have a export facilitating trade policy. However, the Chinese export facilitating has little effect in the improvement of the Chinese comparative advantages. With regard to the imports, Hong and Hong (2016) [9], Hong, Sun and Mu (2016) [10] focused on the Japanese imports of agricultural products, while Hong, Shao and Mu (2016) investigated the Korean imports of primary agricultures [11] to assess the import policies. This study examines the divergence of the Chinese import patterns in the low-technology manufactures of garment, textile and footwear. More specifically, we are interested in the question: is the Chinese import policy of this product category restrictive?

Exploring the Chinese Import Policy on the Low-technology Manufactures of Garment, Textile and Footwear