The Politics of China's Accession to the World Trade Organization: The Dragon Goes Global by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Ethnic Studies, Black Studies (Global), Social Science, Political Science, NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations), Regional Studies, General
ISBN: 9780415369213
Google: Ab-FXgsUIu4C
Goodreads: 3723338
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2000-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Keeping up the momentum

Apart from weathering the domestic debate and rebuffing bureaucratic resistance, Chinese leaders have also managed to keep up the momentum of GATT/WTO accession throughout the process.

The initial decision to join the world trade regime was made by Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Ziyang in 1986 after the then GATT director-general Linden and Dunkel’s visits in 1984, 1985 and 1986 (Jacobson and Oksen berg 1990: 87–92). However, ideological rigidity was a great obstacle to China’s GATT bid in the 1980s and the early 1990s. The concept of ‘market economy’ was still forbidden. Instead, the nature of the transitional economy was officially described as ‘a combination of planning economy and market adjustment’, and later ‘planned commodity economy’. This generated great confusion among foreign negotiators during the review of China’s foreign trade regime, an essential step before bilateral negotiations can be carried out. The Americans put it directly: ‘We only know about two economic regimes in the world, one is the planning economy, the other one is market economy. We never heard of “commodity economy” ’ (Wen 2002). The Chinese delegation tried to explain the nature of China’s economic and trade regime, but their Chinese political jargon only made their counterparts more frustrated. The economic retrenchment after 1989 further increased the foreign suspicion about the nature and direction of the Chinese reform. The then Director-General of GATT, Arthur Dunkel, told Chinese chief negotiator, Mr Shen Jueren: ‘The biggest challenge you are facing is to convince your counterparts with facts that the reform and opening up policy is irreversible.’

Crucially, the ideological breakthrough could only be made from the top. During Deng Xiaoping’s ‘spring-tour’ to south-east China in 1992, the paramount leader urged Chinese officials to abandon orthodox thinking about plan and market according to the communist doctrine. He claimed that both plan and market are means, not ends, to economic development, and that market mechanism can also be utilized by socialism. Deng’s series of talks broke the ideological iceberg and economic retrenchment after the 1989 crackdown, and stimulated a new wave of liberal reform programmes. At the following fourteenth Party Congress in October, China formally announced that the aim of economic reform was to build a ‘Socialist Market Economy’, which became part of the constitution in 1993. On the twelfth Working Party meeting held at the same time in Geneva, Chinese delegates finally found the common language of ‘market economy’, which produced an overwhelming effect among negotiating parties. The reviewing process of China’s trade regime was finalized at the meeting. Tong Zhiguang, then head of the Chinese delegation, admitted that China’s responses to the questions posed by the contracting parties could not be passed without the ‘theoretical breakthrough’ by Deng and the Party Congress (Beijing Morning Post 11 November 2001). China’s chief negotiator Long Yongtu made it clearer: ‘we negotiated six years just for the four characters’ (in Chinese, ‘market economy’ (shichang jingji) is composed of four characters).

The Chinese leadership also generated the momentum of accession through so-called ‘summit diplomacy’. For example,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.