China General Interest
The FTA has been signed, 190 Business Delegates supported the Government Mission at the grand signing in Beijing and now the Government has to go through the processes of parliamentary approval, which should cause little more than superficial obstuction as both main parties support it.
So New Zealand exporters will enjoy the advantages of preferred status – at least until other nations catch up, whilst much of what we had to offer to Chinese exporters was already either available or planned after the tariff reform processes of the last 20 years.
China is certainly flavour of the month, every events organisor seems to be planning China events and no less than four mayors felt constrained to join the business effort by leading Missions to China last month alone.
With so much taxpayer and ratepayer funding available to aid the cause, the efforts of a small member resourced Association such as ours scarcely hit the headlines, but we’ll have a Mission at the International Pavilion at the 103rd Canton Fair in mid April and are already commencing planning for Shanghai Expo 2010.
The value of our efforts will be seen when all the palaver’s done, the other temporary participants return to what they more usually do and NZCTA remains a leader in the efforts to take best advantage of such attractive business opportunities.
Watch this space as the first initiatives extracting user benefits from the the FTA development and planning Expo Shanghai 2010 commence this month.
Apr 21, 2007