China’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement will come into force on January 1, 2022

The Ministry of Commerce website reported on November 3 that on November 2, the ASEAN Secretariat, the custodian of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), issued a notice announcing that six ASEAN countries including Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam The member states and four non-ASEAN member states including China, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia have formally submitted the approval letter to the ASEAN Secretary-General, reaching the threshold for the agreement to enter into force. According to the agreement, RCEP will enter into force for the above ten countries on January 1, 2022.

Effective January 1, 2022 RCEP was initiated by ASEAN in 2012 and took eight years to negotiate. On November 15, 2020, the RCEP was signed.

The member states that signed the agreement include the 10 ASEAN countries and China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, with a total population of 2.27 billion, a GDP of 26 trillion US dollars, and a total export value of 5.2 trillion US dollars, accounting for about 5.2 trillion US dollars of the global total 30%.

The signing of the agreement means that about one-third of the world’s economic volume forms an integrated large market. Overall, RCEP is not only the largest free trade agreement in the world at present, but also a comprehensive, modern, high-quality and reciprocal free trade agreement.