【正文】 upgrades its export structure, the more advanced economies (Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan) also fear for their petitiveness. The current hollowing out of their lowend manufacturing may soon extend to plex production, design, development and related services. Domestic markets are also threatened by China, but so far most attention seems to have been on exports. Offsetting this threat are the promise of the giant Chinese market (WTO accession is only one of several initiatives to liberalize regional trade) and the potential for collaboration with it in exporting to the rest of the world. Trade within the East Asian region is flourishing. China is a growing importer from the region of natural resources that it does not possess. It is also raisin g imports of manufactured products. Its advanced neighbors are selling it sophisticated consumer and producer goods, and using it as a base for processing exports to third countries. The multinational panies (MNCs) that now account for around half of Chinese exports (and far more of its high technology exports, UNCTAD,2002) are incorporating China into production systems spanning the region (‘fragmentation’ and ‘segmentation’ are used to describe this phenomenon3), so promoting considerable 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