Cross-Border E-Commerce and Digital Trade Rules

Abstract

AbstractThe new century has witnessed the booming of the Internet economy and the rising of cross-border e-commerce as a new driving force of the global economy. However, the rule-based international system for cross-border e-commerce is confronted with new challenges in the categorization of products, market access, tariff collection, and intellectual property. Therefore, to keep a secure and ordered system, international organizations, regional economic organizations, countries and regions have participated in researching and developing cross-border e-commerce rules. With new characteristics and development trends, they manifest the change from trade in products to trade in services and from focusing on regional areas to expanding to global areas, and put emphasis on digital trade, information security, and intellectual property rights, behind-the-border regulatory cooperation, the interests of developing countries, and the catalyst of the COVID-19 pandemic. China also attaches great importance to international law and rules of cross-border e-commerce and digital trade. With the high-quality implementation of China’s 14th Five-Year Plan, cross-border e-commerce and digital trade should take domestic development as the mainstay, with domestic and international development reinforcing each other. Today, China is deepening its cooperation with countries in e-commerce to help narrow the digital divide and offer the world more Chinese wisdom and contribution.