U.S. Access to China's Consumer Market: Examination of Chinese E-Commerce, Logistics, Financial Services Sector, Opportunities and Challenges for American Companies, Alibaba and Social Commerce

This authoritative report has been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction. This commission hearing considers U.S. companies' access to China's consumer market, focusing on China's e-commerce, logistics, and financial services sectors. Services make up the largest part of our economy and services trade is a key facet of the U.S.-China economic relationship. While China has made some progress with opening up its services sector to U.S. companies, far more needs to be done. China's rebalancing to a more consumer-centric economy presents opportunities for U.S. companies looking to sell and ship goods to Chinese consumers. One of the most dramatic changes in China's consumer economy has been the remarkable growth of e-commerce. China is currently the largest e-commerce market in the world, with sales reaching $672 billion in 2015. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, by 2019, an estimated one out of every three retail dollars in China will be spent online, the highest percentage in the world. E-commerce has been a key driver of improvements to China's $2.2 trillion-dollar logistics sector. However, China's domestic logistics industry remains underdeveloped, due to the country's historical focus on improving export logistics, at the expense of domestic logistics infrastructure. This has caused logistics to become a major bottleneck for the country's e-commerce sector. China's efforts to develop and modernize its express delivery industry could offer U.S. logistics firms like FedEx and UPS opportunities to expand their China operations. While China has traditionally provided the world with its manufactured goods, China's e-commerce boom has tipped the balance slightly in the other direction, with more and more Chinese consumers purchasing foreign goods. In the run up to Alibaba's conference in Detroit yesterday, Jack Ma touted the "tremendous opportunities" the Chinese market offers for U.S. small businesses and farmers. Such opportunities certainly are welcome.

This compilation includes a reproduction of the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

As a result, American financial institutions, dominant in much of the rest of the world, have actually had stagnant or declining market share in China-- a concern obviously significant for policy makers in the United States, but I would argue these concerns should also be significant in China. Again, my view as an economist is China cannot continue to grow at its present rate without a better financial system. Meanwhile, of course, Chinese companies have largely unfettered access to the financial services market here, and that generally is a good thing. They are using their U.S. financial markets' locations as a corporate haven. Chinese online payment companies are expanding into the United States, most recently with Alipay's partnership with First Data for mobile payment solutions.