【正文】 ble intrafirm trade with other regional bases. China’s own enterprises are likely to specialize with respect to regional counterparts and so raise intraindustry trade in differentiated products. Perhaps worryingly for petitors in other regions, such integration can lead China to plement regional petitiveness as a whole, rather than substitute its exports for those of its neighbors.It is difficult to assess, however, whether plementarily between China and the regional economies will fully offset its petitive threat. The dynamics and plexity of the interactions make it impossible to quantify the oute, even to predict broad directions. The basic issue is whether China’s higher wage neighbors can move into more advanced export activities or functions rapidly enough to permit continued export expansion. If they can, they can continue with exportled growth. If they cannot, they will suffer export deceleration and/or a shift in specialization towards primary products or slowgrowing segments of manufactured exports. The oute, in other words, will depend on the relative growth of technological and other capabilities in Chinese and regional enterprises, with the former having such advantages as lower wages, larger scale economies, greater industrial depth, pools of technical skill and a proactive government. However, as East Asian countries differ widely in these factors (Lall, 2001), they face different kinds and intensity of petitive threat. The nature of the threat depends, moreover, on the organization of the production and marketing system: independent local firms are likely to pete more directly than affiliates of the same MNC spread over different countries in an integrated system.This paper does not try to measure China’s petitive threat or its effects, but to map relative export performance in the 1990s by technology and destination and so assess where the threat appears most intense. We focus on major East Asian exporters5 and on exports to third markets, but we also analyses plementarities between China and East Asia, particularly in electronics, the region’s largest export and the one where MNC systems dominate. As the 1990s predate China’s WTO accession, we do not go into the implications of this accession。 however, the analysis of petitive trends has implications for the evolution of future trade by the region as liberalization grows.Background on Chinese export performanceChinese manufactured exports grew by % per annum over 19902000, pared to % for the world, % for all developing countries and % for the rest of East Asia. Its share of world manufactured exports rose from % to % over the decade and continued rising rapidly. 6 Thus, by 2002 China accounted for % of world merchandise exports。 it was then the fifth largest exporter (after USA, Germany, Japan and France, and ahead of the UK). China’s share of developing world manufactured exports rose from 11% to 20% over the 1990s and of the East Asian region excluding China from % to %. Its export gains (see below) spanned the entire technological spectrum, and were most dynamic in the plex end of the range, in products that have recently driven the export growth of the rest of East Asia.This export surge is likely to be sustained for some time to e. China has ‘spare capacity’ in that its per capita exports are still relatively small,7 wages are much lower than in its main neighbors and it has large reserves