At the Boao Forum, Premier Li Keqiang stated the regional cooperation policy of "speeding up the strategy of Asia free trade area and build an Asian community." Where is the breakthrough of an Asian free trade area? In my opinion, China should promote the Asian economic integration process with the priority on a China, Japan and South Korea Free Trade Area (FTA).

At present, regional FTAs have become a weather vane of world trade liberalization. As WTO Doha negotiations fell into a stalemate and the multilateral trading system was experiencing difficulty, regional, cross-regional, as well as bilateral and multilateral trade negotiations are gradually becoming a new world mainstream trend. This trend is causing a fundamental change in the formation of world economic, trade and investment landscape.

The tide of regional FTA is very high in Asia. According to the Asian Development Bank statistics, by the end of 2013, the number of free trade agreements in Asia had increased from 36 in 2002 to 109, with another 148 free trade agreements under negotiation, totaling 257. These numbers show a momentum far stronger than other areas in the world.

Within recent years, as the global economic center "moves east" and the trade scale enlarges, it is imminent to speed up Asian economic and trade integration. Data shows that in the past ten years the proportion of Asian trade with Europe and the U.S. dropped off markedly, but the proportion of intra-regional trade went up significantly. Therefore, the intra-trade gets stronger and has formed a Sino-centric value chain and " a new wild goose queue model." After the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Chinese free trade area strategy sped up and China has signed 12 free trade agreements with countries and areas such as ASEAN, Pakistan, New Zealand, Peru, Costa Rica, Switzerland, Hong Kong, etc., with the total trade exceeding 1/4 of China's total import and export. In comparison, the China-Japan-South Korean FTA negotiation that started in 2002 obviously falls behind the progress of Asian free trade areas.

In fact, China-Japan-South Korean FTA should be the most important part of China's Asian FTA strategy. Complementary advantages in China-Japan-South Korean industries are the FTA basis. The population of these three countries takes account of 74% of East Asian total population, and 22% of world population; their economic output accounts for 90% of East Asian output and 20% of world output; and their total trade accounts for 70% of East Asian total trade and 20% of the world total trade. The proportion of combined GDP of these three countries in the world GDP keeps growing, up to 21.59% in 2012 from 18.02% in 2002.

At present, the intra-trade of these three countries only accounts for 21% of their total trade, and the investment among them only accounts for 6% of their total. These numbers are not in conformity with their economic scale (accounting for 20% of the world economy and more than 70% of Asian economy), much lower than EU (with its intra-trade at 65%) and North America (with its intra-trade at over 40%). Therefore, establishing a China-Japan-South Korean FTA will have great economic and trade benefits. According to a model-based prediction, if a China-Japan-South Korean FTA covering trade of goods, service trade and investment is established, Chinese GDP will gain 1.1% to 2.9%, Japan 0.1% to 0.5%, and South Korea 2.5% to 3.1% respectively.