Most research works comparing the transition to market economy in China and Eastern Europe, come to the conclusion that the initial conditions explain much of the dissimilarities observed in the reform strategy as well as in the economic performance that have characterised the two areas. The differences in their the level of economic development, in their size, in their international surroundings are of special significance regarding the foreign trade policies and patterns as they directly affect the way the CEECs and China can be integrated in the world economy. Nevertheless, although the countries have chosen different approaches to market reforms, opening up to international trade has been a key element of their transition. The comparison in this field raises several questions: through what means these highly different countries have pursued the same target and have intensified their involvement in international trade and capital flows?, how have their trade policies been connected with their overall reform strategy?, how domestic and external constraints have influenced their trade performances and what prospects can be drawn from their evolving position in world trade?

The paper first sketches out the experiences of the CEECs and of China concerning trade policy and trade reforms and then turns to trade development and to the changes in their trade patterns during the transition period.

The trade reforms that have been implemented in China since 1979 and in the CEECs since 1989 have displayed some similar features: demonopolisation of foreign trade, progress toward convertibility, provisions to attract foreign direct investments. But the opening up of domestic economies responded to different concerns and priorities. For the CEECs, trade liberalisation has been a cornerstone of overall economic liberalisation. For China, opening-up has been a means to promote economic growth and modernisation. The differences in trade policies can be traced back to the respective global strategies of reforms that implied not only different timing (radical changes versus gradualism) but also different policy choices. The CEECs have emphasised trade liberalisation and namely import liberalisation as an instrument to enhance competition from outside, and to import the world relative prices. China has emphasised the decentralisation of foreign trade decisions, but this has fallen short of import liberalisation, and it has implemented export promotion measures. The international environment and the regional context have provided these countries with specific opportunities and constraints that influenced their strategies. While the CEECs have emulated European trade regimes with the aim of integrating the European Union, China's trade policy has found an attractive model in the East Asian countries experiences.

Since the beginning of the 80s, China and CEECs foreign trade have displayed diverging trends. In 1988, the CEECs taken together had about the same weight in international trade as China and in 1994 China's foreign trade was about twice as important as the CEECs trade. But to a large extent this gap results from the collapse of intra-CMEA trade and in both cases the trade with the OECD has increased rapidly. Nevertheless, the engine of the export drive to the OECD has been different: in China, it has been supported by a high rate of economic growth, whereas in the CEECs, the export capacities have been reoriented towards new markets while the production has been falling, up to 1993. China has sustained this export drive during fifteen years, and the times series are still too short to draw a definite assessment of the CEECs export performance that will now depend on the supply side. The economic recovery that has spread to all the CEECs since 1994 and has been associated with sustained export performance gives ground for considering that in the years to come most CEECs are going to keep a dynamic part in international trade.

In both the CEECs and China, the development of export was accompanied by substantial changes in their commodity composition. The pace of these structural changes has not been faster in China than in the CEE, and this tends to confirm that export and industrial restructuring takes time in any reform strategy. A major difference lies in the relative importance of intra versus inter industry trade: China's trade with OECD is still based on inter-sectoral complementarities, while intra-industry trade prevails in the case of the Central European Countries (Hungary, Poland, fermer CSFR).

Finally, although foreign direct investment flows to China have been much larger than those going to Central European countries, due to the small size of the latter, their role in their domestic economy was as important as in Chinese economy in 1992-1993. In Hungary and in China, they form the core of the foreign trade sector. The expansion of foreign trade is thus a part of a trend towards the internationalisation of the transition economies, which have been more and more integrated in the world-wide productive and trade networks of foreign firms.