China's integration into the world’s economy will create harsh difficulties for a great number of countries. During the last 20 years, China's trade expanded at double the rate of world trade. Today China is one of the world's top trading nations, and has 4% of total world trade, comparing to 1% in 1980. Nevertheless, China's exports and trade surpluses are achieving politically sensitive levels, and more stress on export-led increase may not be sustainable. China itself is still a quite closed market, for imports of goods and even more closed for imports of services. Letting the imports to China's markets, particularly as a member of WTO, can offer more reasonable development and simplify the international stresses arising from China's transformation.

The importance of China in external trade, especially in the region’s production chain saved its growing trend. China’s exports and imports achieved 60 percent of GDP in 2003 and these amounts made country fourth largest exporter in the world. The increasing importance of China in the world’s production of manufactured goods and rising domestic demand caused other sectors of China’s economy to grow, and also resulted the raise in prices for a lot of goods. China’s imports that are mainly from Asia also got bigger and China’s trade deficit with the region enlarged but the trade with the U.S. and Europe balances it back. The general trade surplus was $45 billion which is about 3 percent of GDP. China’s international position continues to grow stronger. The current account surplus increased by a half percentage point in 2003 to three and a half percent of GDP. Official reserves grew by $162 billion in 2003. External debt increased to $200 billion in 2003 but it is very modest to exports and GDP. By the end of May 2004 China had a trade deficit of $9 billion as compared to $2 billion of surplus that it had for at the same time of the previous year.

The drive for investment by recent local governments that started by the end of 2002 was stimulated by extensive excess liquidity in China’s banking system. People’s Bank of China was worried about fast credit growth that was easy to see even in the beginning of 2003 but its policies were delayed by SARS epidemic. Significant increase in capital inflows made it more difficult for PBC to implement the monetary policies. However, they managed to do that, in July 2003 PBC increased the reserve requirement by one percent and also announced a planned increase of ½ percent in April 2004. By doing this they tried to reduce the credit growth to banks. To deter the increase of overinvestment in branches of economy that have already faced it, the government made stricter lending standards. To finish up PBC raised short-term relending by 0.6 and rediscount rates by 0.3 percent in March 2004.

If China continues to develop as it is doing right now then by the midst of this century it will have developed actually three transitions. First and at the same time the one of greatest importance is the transition from a planned to a market economy. Second is from agrarian to an industrialized country. Last, but certainly not least, from a centralized to a participatory government.

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