World Trade Organization (WTO) debate

Should China join the WTO? Attitudes towards China’s accession to the WTO reflected the diverse interests of Chinese in an era of globalization. Central leaders saw the WTO primarily as a way to formalize multilateral solutions to trade disputes with major export markets (especially eliminating the contentious annual review of bilateral agreements with the United States), and indirectly as a means to use foreign competition to dismantle the planned economy. Local government leaders and heads of central state-owned enterprises viewed it as a way to push Chinese corporations in competitive sectors (electronics, appliances, telecommunications, chemicals and energy, but not media, which are excluded from WTO agreements) to ‘go abroad’ and compete with multi-national corporations in emerging markets. Many scholars of liberalism saw the WTO as part of an inevitable, albeit painful, process of integration with the global economy, although New Left intellectuals argued that the uniquely strict conditions negotiated with WTO members constituted a new form of economic imperialism.

Although knowing little about the conditions of accession, the average Chinese will directly feel the pressure from increasing foreign competition at the workplace.

Further reading

Lardy, N. (2002) Integrating China into the Global Economy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Pearson, M. (2001). ‘The Case of China’s Accession to GATT/WTO’. In D.Lampton (ed.), The Making of Chinese Foreign and Security Policy in the Reform Era. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

STEVEN W.LEWIS