Agence France Presse / Patrick Baert
BEIJING, April 18 (AFP) - China will resume talks shortly with the European Union on joining the World Trade Organization (WTO), the EU ambassador here said Tuesday.
EU envoy Endymion Wilkinson added that he hoped the next round of talks would lead to an agreement on China's membership of the trade body.
"I am happy to announce that the negotiations will reconvene very shortly," Wilkinson told a World Economic Forum conference here.
"We are winding down to what we think will be the final session," he said. "A deal is within reach, but important issues remain to be solved."
Wilkinson declined to say when or where the next round of negotiations would take place.
Pascal Lamy, the EU's top trade negotiator who took part in the last round of talks in Beijing in March, said last week that he was ready to return to the Chinese capital for further discussions.
The European Union is the largest of China's trading partners yet to conclude a bilateral agreement that would open the way for Beijing to accede to the WTO and its rules-based trading regime.
Wilkinson said he was "confident progress will be made" during the next round of EU-China talks and he hoped Beijing would be admitted to the WTO as of this year.
He stressed that the EU was putting its "emphasis on content, not on timing" and rejected any link between the EU-China negotiations and an upcoming vote in the US Congress on granting China permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) status.
The US House of Representatives is scheduled to vote in late May and the US Senate in June on the measure, part of the agreement signed in November between China and the United States on Beijing's membership of the WTO.
The EU said at the time that the US-China WTO accord covered around 80 percent of its demands but that certain points remained to be negotiated.
"We need a deal with China which is distinctly European in its character," Wilkinson said.
"We are looking for nondiscrimination vis-a-vis China's other trading partners, so that European companies enjoy the same advantages extended to them.
"We hope a deal will show that in sectors where Europe is predominant that we get some greater concessions than what we have been offered so far.
"There are matters where the European companies are very competitive which have not yet been met," the EU envoy said. "Those are the areas which we are concentrating on now in the negotiations.
"Worldwide, Europeans have very strong banking systems, very strong insurance companies and a major automobile industry and we have the world's largest companies in mobile telephones," he noted.
Wilkinson also said that EU countries were "looking for some reduction in our deficit with China," currently some 20 billion dollars a year and growing for the past 10 years.
The EU is the second largest exporter to China after Japan and the third largest importer of Chinese goods after Japan and the United States.
Wilkinson also said the 15 EU members were all behind the approach to the negotiations with China.
EU foreign ministers last week in Luxembourg gave their "total support" to chief negotiator Lamy "for continuing to negotiate in a firm manner," he said.:
