An Inquiry into the Culture and Trade Issue within International Trade Law: Navigating New Regulatory Frontiers in the Digital Age and Free Trade Agreements

International trade law consists of multilateral trade agreements and bilateral and regional trade agreements. The World Trade Organization (WTO) offers a set of rules for regulating global trade. Cultural goods and services fall within the scope of WTO law, meaning that measures of WTO Members affecting trade in such goods and services are subject to their WTO obligations. However, cultural goods and services carry both economic and cultural value, which makes their treatment controversial. The “trade and culture” debate has been going on for decades, but has mainly been conducted at the WTO level and from a Western perspective. However, also at the bilateral and regional level, States adopt various culture-related approaches. In this respect, bringing a Chinese perspective to the current debate may generate refreshing insights: (i) China is a prominent WTO Member since 2001 and has signed 16

Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs); (ii) China is increasingly present in global cultural trade, as illustrated by the fact that it is the principal origin of EU’s imports of cultural goods (Eurostat, 2017); and (iii) the EU itself has stressed the importance of cultural trade in the 2016 EU strategy on China.
This research aims to answer the following questions: How do the WTO law and RTAs address cultural goods and services issues? Are the current rules desirable? What are China’s position and practice? Can China’s approach suggest a way forward for the “trade and culture” debate?