By Paul Eckert
BEIJING (Reuters) - The head of an EU negotiating team set off for home on Friday saying he was confident of a deal on China's bid to join the World Trade Organization despite failing to reach agreement in four days of talks.
As he left his Beijing hotel, Hans-Friedrich Beseler told reporters "significant progress" had been made, but major disagreements remained.
"We are full of goodwill and we are confident that it will be made very soon," he said.
The talks between China and the European Union, the most significant of 13 WTO members yet to conclude a market-opening agreement to pave the way for Chinese admission, ended on Thursday with no agreement and no date set for them to resume.
"I will not go into any details on stumbling blocks. We made some progress, significant progress. We are not yet there," Beseler said, but declined to say when more talks might be held.
"That has to be seen. The talks will start again when the time is ripe," he said.
EU sources said a key sticking point was a European demand for 51 percent foreign ownership rights in Chinese mobile telephone networks, which would go beyond the 49 percent the United States agreed to in its WTO deal with China in November.
Fresh Cloud
The setback in the talks, which opened on Monday with optimistic noises from both sides, cast a fresh cloud over China's 14-year bid to join the WTO, already troubled by a raging war of words between Beijing and Washington over Chinese military threats to Taiwan.
There was confusion over how much remained to be done, with Brussels flatly contradicting an optimistic Chinese assertion there was now a "basic understanding."
The state-run Xinhua news agency said Chinese Foreign Trade Minister Shi Guangsheng invited EU counterpart Pascal Lamy to come to Beijing to conclude talks, but Brussels said there was not enough progress to warrant the trip.
Jeanne-Marie Gescher, head of the British Chamber of Commerce in Beijing, said European businesses were consulting EU diplomats to find out what caused the talks to stall.
"We're sorry that the negotiations were not able to be concluded, but we're optimistic that they will be," she said.
Beseler declined to be drawn on the starkly different characterizations of the talks.
"I don't know whether there is a difference of assessment, because both sides know quite well the points where we agree and the points where we do not yet agree," he said.
"There are a certain number of minor points on which we disagree and a certain number of major points."
The sources said the talks had not even reached the issue of insurance, another major area of EU concern along with mobile telephone networks.
"The EU has decided to play relative hardball on those issues and the Chinese are understandably reluctant to go back from the position that they achieved in their Sino-U.S. deal," said Calum Macleod, an analyst at BateyBurn consultancy.
"It's a stalemate and this one will take a few months to run," he told Reuters.
U.S. Poised For Pitched Wto Battle
China, which must reach agreements with all members who request talks before it can join the WTO, signed pacts with the United States, Japan, Australia and Canada last year and struck an accord with India earlier this week.
On Thursday, President Clinton promised an all-out effort to win congressional approval of the trade agreement after key lawmakers said the pact may face defeat.
Administration officials hope Congress will vote soon, fearing delay would bog it down in heated election politics.
In exchange for Beijing opening a wide range of markets from agriculture to telecommunications, Congress must grant China permanent normal trade relations -- a status Beijing now is granted annually.
Permanent NTR would guarantee Chinese goods the same low-tariff access to U.S. markets as products from nearly every other nation.
Prospects for congressional approval of the trade deal have dimmed since Monday, when China said it might invade Taiwan if the island dragged its heels on reunification talks indefinitely.
CHINESE BRINKMANSHIP?
A European diplomat in Beijing, who declined to be identified, said EU negotiators spent valuable time discussing issues they thought had been settled during the last round of talks in Brussels in January.
"Issues which seemed to have been clarified in Brussels were put in doubt again," the diplomat said.
"Overall, there was a sense that the Chinese had not shown the sense of purpose and determination they showed in Brussels," the diplomat added.
In another development businessmen said might be brinkmanship linked to WTO talks, China delayed the rollout of mobile phone networks that use U.S. technology (CDMA), saying the Chinese operator of the network had not finished preparations.
The hold up came just one week after Qualcomm Inc signed an agreement in Beijing for China's number two state carrier China Unicom to build a national network using the CDMA mobile standard.
The CDMA agreement was a Chinese concession that smoothed the way to a November China-U.S. WTO agreement and EU negotiators were believed to be trying to win matching offers for European telecoms firms.:
