AFX.COM | September 2, 2003
BEIJING -- Chinese delegates going to the upcoming World Trade Organization talks in Cancun, Mexico will aim to resist foreign pressure for additional concessions in opening up its huge market, officials and analysts said.
China has been a member of the Geneva-based trade body for nearly 21 months, and is still in the middle of grueling efforts to implement concessions it already has made, according to officials.
"We want to be treated softly," said Yu Jianhua, deputy head of the Chinese commerce ministry's WTO department. "We've made a lot of concessions to join the WTO, and we are not ready to make new ones."
Reflecting this mood in Beijing, Chinese delegates to Cancun are expected to insist their country is not prepared to undertake any further tariff cuts in industrial and farm products.
Matching its unambitious agenda for Cancun, China is unlikely to seek a broader role inside the organization, even though it is the world's most populous nation and has the fastest growing major economy.
In the weeks leading up to the meeting, which will mark a last-ditch effort to get global trade talks underway, China has made few hints of its views on central issues such as agriculture.
One of the only suggestions of China's position was Beijing's backing in late August of a proposal on farm trade, also supported by countries such as Brazil and India.
The proposal, with its call for sharp reductions in the subsidies to farmers, would place China firmly in the Third World camp.
But in general, China has been extremely reluctant to appear as a leader of the developing countries inside the WTO.
"One of the ironies is that a country like India is much more vocal and even aggressive and has turned into a spokesman for the Third World, instead of China," said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, director of the Hong Kong-based French Center for Research on Contemporary China.
"China is not trying very hard to become a representative of the have-nots. One of the reasons is that China wants to be a big power and play in the same courtyard as the big boys like the United States, the EU and Japan," he said.
At the previous WTO ministerial meeting in Doha, Qatar, it was India rather than China that made a vocal stand on behalf of the Third World using strong, blunt language that upset many delegations. "It's not too easy for China to be a spokescountry for the Third World, as long as it has a huge trade surplus with the US, EU and Japan," said Cabestan.
Despite the busy agenda at Cancun, the meeting could also become an opportunity for some members of the WTO to take stock of China's record as a member since December 2001. Many observers agree that China accepted unusually far-reaching concessions in order to make it into the WTO at the end of a record-breaking 15 years of negotiations and 37 bilateral agreements with individual members of the body.
Even so, the changes brought about by WTO membership may not have been as profound as many Chinese feared when their country joined the group in December 2001. The reason is that China had more than a decade, since the beginning of WTO negotiations, to prepare for membership.
Even more important, the changes caused by WTO membership are a relatively smooth continuation of economic reforms that kicked off as early as the 1970s.
"Some believed China's accession to the WTO was going to be a shock to the Chinese economy," said Gilles Guiheux, a Hong Kong-based French expert on Chinese business.
"That was not the case, because there was a 20-year history of opening up," he said. Some large Chinese companies seem to actually have prospered despite -- or even as a result of -- WTO membership.
For instance, the auto sector has not yet experienced misery on a scale predicted by some because of a WTO requirement to lower car import tariffs from 100 percent to 25 percent, inviting a flood of foreign imports, analysts said.
First Automotive Works, China's largest car manufacturer, said this month its first half net profit grew 44 pct from last year to 141 mln yuan, boosted by strong sales. Other state-owned enterprises may be less fortunate, but even they were under pressure long before China's membership of the WTO, as they had been threatened by private or semi-private businesses for years.
An industry like ballpoint pen manufacturing, for example, is now entirely in non-public hands in China, as state companies have been pushed out of business by nimbler enterprises, analysts noted.AFX.COM:
