Seoul, June 1 (Xinhua)-Chinese Minister of Commerce Gao Hucheng and the Korean Minister of Trade, Industry and Energy Yoon Sang-jick respectively represented the governments of the two countries and officially signed the Free Trade Agreement between the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Government of the Republic of Korea in Seoul Korea on June 1 and jointly met with journalists after the signing ceremony.
China-Korea FTA covers the broadest range of issues and involves the biggest trade volume of countries among the foreign FTAs signed by China so far. This FTA is a mutually beneficial agreement for both China and Korea and realizes the goal of “generally balanced, comprehensive and high-level benefits”. According to the agreement, in terms of the opening level, the proportion of the liberalization of trade in goods of the two countries exceeds 90% of the tax items and 85% of the trade volume. The rage of the agreement covers 17 fields such as the trade in goods, the service trade, the investment and the rules and the “trade and economic topics in the 21st century” like the e-commerce, the competitive policy, the government procurement and the environment. At the same time, both sides promised to continue to conduct the service trade negotiations with the mode of the negative list after the singed agreement taking effect and to carry out the investment negotiations on the basis of pre-establishment national treatment and the mode of negative list.
