The forthcoming article “The politics of rejection: Explaining Chinese import refusals” by Sung Eun Kim, Rebecca L. Perlman, and Grace Zeng is summarized by the author(s) below.
Governments have long been known to use health and safety standards as an underhand way of impeding imports while feigning an open trading posture. This paper examines a less explored explanation for such regulatory barriers. We show that in the same way that product standards can be used as a subtle form of protectionism, so too can they be used as a means of punishing or coercing one’s trading partners. Indeed, we theorize that some of the same characteristics that make health and safety standards attractive to governments as a form of protectionism – particularly the ambiguity surrounding their intent – also make these measures attractive as a way to retaliate against foreign nations.
In order to evaluate our theory, we collect and translate original data from 2011-2019 on China’s use of import refusals. An import refusal is the rejection of an import at the border, supposedly because the product in question fails to meet domestic health, safety, or environmental rules. Combining our data on import refusals with data on political tensions involving military actors, we demonstrate that during the period under study, China has systematically increased its bilateral use of import refusals in the wake of foreign policy squabbles. This has allowed China to exert political pressure on trading partners with which it is at odds, while maintaining plausible deniability about its actions.
Our research contributes to the broader literature on the source of regulatory barriers to trade and the extent to which political tensions harm economic relations. More narrowly, our findings offer insight into China’s use of economic coercion, a topic that has been of growing interest both to political science scholars and to policymakers. While there have been numerous anecdotes suggesting that China has, at times, used import refusals as a form of political retribution, to date there has been a lack of evidence demonstrating a systematic relationship between instances of import refusals and those of heightened conflict. Our findings provide the first evidence of a consistent and measurable connection between China’s rejection of imports and the existence of political tensions.
About the Author(s): Sung Eun Kim is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Korea University, Rebecca L. Perlman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and Grace Zeng is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. Their research “The politics of rejection: Explaining Chinese import refusals” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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